Clarissa Tossin, installation view, “Falling From Earth,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, 2022. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)
Clarissa Tossin: Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow Lecture
Clarissa Tossin will deliver the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
About Clarissa Tossin
Clarissa Tossin is the 2025-26 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil and Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She works with moving-image, sculpture, and installation to propose alternative narratives for places defined by histories of colonization. Through a mix of research, storytelling, and gestures of mapping and layering, Tossin places seemingly disparate elements into conversation, generating unexpected moments of interconnectedness across time and space. Tossin’s childhood in Brasília heavily influenced her early films and installations deconstructing Brazil’s modernist history, which over the years has expanded to encompass geographies ranging from her adopted home of Los Angeles to the vast realms of outer space. She was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and in “Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home,” in New Orleans. As the Freund Fellow, she will teach in the College of Art and develop her work in preparation for an exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum next year.
Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow 2025-26
More Upcoming Lectures
Apr 15 at 5:30pm • Museum Lobby
Being and Becoming in Contemporary Chinese Art
This talk by Peggy Wang, associate professor of art history and Asian studies at Bowdoin College, addresses the conflicting pressures that artists in China confronted during the 1990s and early 2000s, including rapid urbanization and cultural globalization. Even as they navigated political constraints and deficits in resources, contemporary artists enacted productive strategies for making and exhibiting their art. This lecture foregrounds artists’ assertions of being and becoming, both as critical tactics for configuring identity and generative topics unto themselves. Wang will particularly examine how artists studied the vibrant dynamics of change through temporal, historical, and material dimensions in their art.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China, on view at the Kemper Art Museum from February 27 to July 27, 2026.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series