An idea is just the shape of a flower, 2022
Blas Isasi | Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow Lecture
Blas Isasi will deliver the 2025 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
The Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellowship, which is jointly sponsored by Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Saint Louis Art Museum, is designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles. Fellows teaching in the Sam Fox School’s College of Art, and produce work for a solo exhibition in the Saint Louis Art Museum’s Currents series.
About Blas Isasi
Blas Isasi is a Peruvian visual artist living and working in New Orleans. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in painting from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Tulane University. Isasi is also an alumnus of the Jan van Eyck Academie, an post-academic arts 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 U.S., and Europe. In 2021, he was an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center. He is participating in “Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home,” New Orleans´ 2024-2025 triennal curated by Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson. As the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellow at the 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
It's like talking to a wall
2020
An idea is just the shape of a flower
2022
Recording
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 19 at 5:30pm • Steinberg Auditorium
Artist Panel: Mary Weatherford and Katharina Grosse
Artists Katharina Grosse and Mary Weatherford, whose works are featured in Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, both engage forms of nonfigurative painting that have a strong sensorial presence. A discussion moderated by Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator, will explore how their polyphonic structures invite careful seeing to suggest alternative worlds.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series
About the Artists
Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in 1961. She has held professorships at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010–18) and Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (2000–9) and currently lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Her recent institutional exhibitions and on-site paintings include The Sprayed Dear at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (until January 2026), Wunderbild at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (until September 2025), Déplacer les étoiles, Centre Pompidou – Metz (2024–25); Why Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle; Albertina, Vienna (2023–24); and Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions, Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022), toured to Kunstmuseum Bern (2023) and Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024). In June 2025, she realized a temporary in-situ work for Art Basel on the fair’s forecourt and the adjacent architectural structures. Museum collections include Albertina, Vienna; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen; Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Istanbul Modern; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Magasin III, Stockholm; MARe (Muzeul de Artă Recentă / Museum of Recent Art), Bucharest; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum Azman, Jakarta; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Serralves Museum, Porto; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; and QAGOMA, Brisbane.
Photo Credit: Franz Grünewald
Mary Weatherford was born in Ojai, California. She earned a BA from Princeton University in 1984, was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1985, and graduated with an MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2006. Weatherford makes paintings that evoke a specific time, locale, and temperature. Her recent works, in which the canvases are affixed and sometimes juxtaposed with working neon light, provide an elusive and sometimes radical comment on the legacy of gestural abstraction. Weatherford is noted for her masterful use of overlapping fields of color, and as her work has advanced the increasingly complex and luminous interactions between paint, lighting, and wiring have produced a hybrid form that collapses the distinction between painting and installation. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Photo Credit: Antony Hoffman