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.
Clarissa Tossin
Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow 2025-26
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 11 at 5:30pm • Kemper Art Museum
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.