Leslie Barlow

Leslie Barlow is a visual artist who primarily uses oil painting to embrace and investigate the entangled and elaborate web that comprises the intersections of racial identity, community, love, and belonging. Her work often captures community members in intimate forms that reveal vibrant and vital dimensions. 

Barlow’s recent solo exhibitions include Within, Between, and Beyond at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2021), A Familiar Portrait of Labor and Love at Bing Davis Memorial Gallery at the Upper Iowa University in Fayette (2019), and Quiet Enigmas and Familiar Love at St. Mary’s University’s Lillian Davis Hogan Gallery in Winona, Minnesota (2019). Her work has been featured in the group exhibitions Rituals of Resistance at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2021–2022), In Search of Lost Time at Dreamsong in Minneapolis (2021), and Creative Confinement at Minnesota’s Rochester Center for the Arts (2020–2021), among others. She has received the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2021), the Cultural Community Partnership Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2020), and the McKnight Artist Fellowship (2019).

Her work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Weisman Art Museum, and US Bank Stadium, among others. Barlow is also a founding member of Creatives After Curfew, a collective of mural artists formed in summer 2020, and a founder of Public Functionary’s PF Studios, an incubator and studio program centering emerging BIPOC artists.

She lives and works in Minneapolis.

www.lesliebarlowartist.com

Tricia in her living room, 2021
Within, Between, and Beyond series
oil, pastel, acrylic on panel
60 x 48 inches
Eleonore and her sister, above the Mississippi, 2021
Within, Between, and Beyond series
oil, acrylic, quilt on panel
60 x 48 inches
Nicole and Seth and their daughter (and daughter to be), in the kitchen, 2020
Within, Between, and Beyond series
oil and acrylic on panel
60 x 48 inches
Carolina, on Lake Street, 2019
Within, Between, and Beyond series
oil, pastel, acrylic on panel
60 x 48 inches
Untitled (Portraits During a Pandemic), 2020
oil on paper
9 x 15 inches
Untitled (Portraits During a Pandemic), 2020
oil on paper
9 x 15 inches
Ruth Chacey, 2019
A Familiar Portrait of Labor and Love series
oil, pastel, acrylic, photo transfer, fabric on canvas
66 x 48 inches
Ellen Barlow, 2019
A Familiar Portrait of Labor and Love series
oil, pastel, acrylic, photo transfer, fabric on canvas
66 x 48 inches
collection Minneapolis Institute of Art