Blas Isasi | Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow Lecture

Blas Isasi is a Peruvian visual artist living and working in New Orleans. He earned a BA with a major in painting from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and a MFA in sculpture from Tulane University. Isasi is also an alumnus of the Jan van Eyck Academie, an arts post-academic program in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He is also a former recipient of the Braunschweig Projects Scholarship, consisting of a year-long artist residency in Brunswick, Germany.

Isasi’s recent work explores the aesthetics and poetics of the Peruvian desert as an entry point to investigating Andean cosmology and its potential to shed light on key aspects of our troubled present that remain obscure. His goal is not to re-enchant the world after Modernity´s failure as a totalizing project, but to highlight and reveal the cosmic forces that never ceased to shape politics, society, culture, economy, materiality and reality as a whole. Isasi has exhibited in many venues across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. In 2021, he was an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center. He is one of the artists participating in Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home, New Orleans´ triennale curated by Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson. During his fellowship at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Isasi will be working on The weight of a gaze (is to listen to the sound of a kilogram), a project that will culminate in a solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum.