About the Artist:
Leslie Barlow is a visual artist and educator living and working in Minneapolis. In her visual art practice, Barlow’s current work uses figurative oil paintings to share stories that explore the politics of representation, identity, otherness, and race. Barlow actively exhibits her work throughout the United States and is currently working towards an exhibition of a new body of work that will be shared at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in early 2021. In the summer of 2020, she joined a collective of public artists (Creatives After Curfew) to create and facilitate community mural work in response to George Floyd’s murder and in solidarity with the subsequent unrest and uprising. She currently teaches at the University of Minnesota, helps run the organization Midwest Mixed and she also supports emerging artists as the Director of Studio 400.  

About the Artwork
Sweetness: Art transforms ideas, hearts, and minds. In my work I am interested in examining and reimagining our relationship to our racial identities through healing our collective understanding of belonging and what it means to be family. As a storyteller, and my work shares stories about real people in our communities. I believe that stories connect the past, present, and future, and see value and healing in visual representation of historically marginalized stories and identities.