College of Visual and Performing Arts Dean bruce d. mcclung has announced the appointment of Blas Isasi Gutiérrez as Assistant Professor of 3D Foundations.
Professor Isasi is a Peruvian visual artist currently based in St. Louis, Missouri. His 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 to reveal the cosmic forces that never cease to shape politics, society, culture, economy, materiality, and reality.
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 in New Orleans. He recently participated in Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home, New Orleans’s Triennale curated by Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson. He is also the 2024–2025 Henry L. & Natalie E. Freund Fellow at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and is currently working on a project that will culminate in a solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum in early 2026. He is also a former recipient of the Braunschweig Projects Scholarship, a year-long artist residency in Brunswick, Germany.
Isasi has taught at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Tulane University, and Washington University in St. Louis where he is currently a visiting lecturer. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) with a major in painting from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in sculpture from Tulane University. He is also an alumnus of the Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic arts program in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
