On behalf of the McKnight Foundation, Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) announces the six recipients of the 2025 McKnight Fellowships for Visual Artists: Leslie Barlow, Charles Matson Lume, Joe Sinness, Laura Wennstrom, Diane Willow, and Shun Yong. Designed to support mid-career Minnesota artists, the McKnight Fellowships for Visual Artists provide each recipient with a $25,000 stipend, public recognition, professional encouragement from national critics, and a residency facilitated by the Artist Communities Alliance (ACA). The fellowships are funded by a grant from the McKnight Foundation and administered by MCAD.The 2025 McKnight fellows were selected from a group of 144 applicants by a national panel of arts professionals. Jurors were Hương Ngô, interdisciplinary artist and educator, based in Chicago, IL and Santa Barbara, CA; Alisa Swindell, Associate Curator of Photography, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; and Claudia Zapata, Associate Curator of Latino Art, Blanton Museum of Art, TX. Heavenly Leslie BarlowLeslie Barlow is a visual artist, educator, and cultural worker from Minneapolis, MN. Barlow believes art and art making are both healing and liberatory, through the power of representation, witnessing, and storytelling. Her life-sized oil paintings are inspired by community and personal experiences, often serving as both monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate spheres of love, family, and friendship. Barlow is a recipient of the 2021 Jerome Hill Fellowship, the 2025 and 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, the 20/20 Springboard Fellowship, and five MN State Arts Board grants between 2016 and 2023. In addition to her studio practice, Barlow also supports emerging artists at Public Functionary as Director of PF Studios and is a part of the Creatives After Curfew mural collective. In 2023, Barlow became the founder and producer of ConFluence, working with a team of artists, organizers, and self-proclaimed nerds to launch the first-ever ConFluence art and science fiction convention. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota and is represented by Bockley Gallery. lesliebarlowartist.com Lacuna (for Gusfaf Sobin) Charles Matson LumeCharles Matson Lume is a visual artist who believes we need beauty every day. He believes "art is a verb—not a noun" and "the loveliest sounds arise out of the deepest silences.” He has been awarded artist fellowships and grants from the following institutions: Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and Minnesota State Arts Board. He has had over fifty solo exhibitions and participated in over one hundred group exhibitions both internationally and nationally at institutions such as: Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; The Cello Factory, London, England; Akureyri Art Center, Akureyri, Iceland; Babel Kunst, Trondheim, Norway; Kemijävi Art Gallery, Kemijävi, Finland; and Hunter College/Time Square Gallery, New York, NY. He has participated in artist residencies in Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, and the US. Matson Lume’s art has been featured in: The Irish Times, BeautifulDecay.com, Hyperallergic.com, ART PAPERS, Art Notes: International Art Magazine, and National Public Radio. His art has been curated into artist registries at White Columns, The Drawing Center, and ISE Cultural Foundation, all located in New York, NY. He lives with his family in St. Paul, MN. White Columns Artist Registry Golden Hour Joe SinnessJoe Sinness is a visual artist who creates intricate drawings and works on paper culled from detritus, flora, fauna, pornography, kitsch, and material comforts. Rendered in colored pencil, his still lifes and portraits take on lives of their own, pointing beyond the frame of the drawing and invoking displaced histories tied to their material referents. Specifically, Sinness sees his artwork as a chance to balance an urge for heteronormative assimilation with more authentic subversion. The work is a personal means for visualizing desire and transforming shame into dignity and pride. Active resistance is camp, subversive, and necessary. We live in dark times, and cultural criticism is essential. Intersectionality and art as resistance are critical to our Survival. Sinness holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). Sinness is also a three-time recipient of the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship (2025, 2019, 2013), the 2017 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and was a 2015 Artist-In-Residence with the Fire Island Artist Residency in Cherry Grove. His artwork can be found in numerous private collections, as well as the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Macalester College, and the Tweed Museum of Art. joesinness.com Support System Laura WennstromLaura Wennstrom is a multimedia artist, currently making large-scale sculptures from readymade domestic objects. Using everyday household material, Wennstrom explores her relationship to the physical and emotional overwhelm of caregiving through sculpture, installation, sewing, and assemblage. Her work has been widely shown in solo and group exhibitions across the country. Wennstrom holds an MFA in New Media from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in Studio Art from North Park University in Chicago, Illinois. She has a robust teaching practice, making art with people of all ages through the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bethel University, and Dunwoody Technical College. laurawennstrom.com A Space for Breath Diane WillowDiane Willow is a multi-modal artist and creative catalyst. By any medium necessary best describes her process of moving fluidly among media that include tactile sound, bioluminescent plankton, sculptural video, and tuneable atmospheres. She calls upon technological modes of extending our senses and the intangible ways that our bodies intuit space and presence to invite people to become choreographers of their experience of art. With an expansive record of national and international exhibitions, she has a distinct preference for creating new work in relationship with each context. Her exhibitions have been hosted in places that include in-between architectural spaces in Beijing, a thousand-year-old courtyard room at the Kaihuasi monastery Shanxi, pediatric waiting rooms in Boston neighborhood health centers, Apex Art NYC, the MIT Museum, the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, and a tidal channel in Boston Harbor. A graduate of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, she first returned to MIT as an institute-wide artist-in-residence, and again as visiting professor at the Media Lab. Willow has been an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium, Guest Professor of New Media Art at the Beijing Film Academy, and Creative CityMaking artist with the City of Minneapolis. As Professor of Interdisciplinary Art and Participatory Culture at the University of Minnesota, she initiates collaborations centering art at the nexus of art, technology, and ecology. These include Wonder Women: Art & Technology, CHANT (Culture, Healing, Art, Nature, and Technology), and the intercollegiate ArTeS (Art+Technology+Science) Collaborative Research Studio. dianewillow.net Harun Shun YongShun Yong is a Malaysian Chinese photographer, storyteller, and paper maker whose work navigates the complexities of immigration, identity, and memory. Yong’s practice reflects a deep engagement with intergenerational trauma, cultural preservation, and community storytelling. His recent work explores the blend of photography and papermaking, drawing from his art residency in Ino, Kochi Prefecture, Japan in 2024. He continues to investigate colonial labor histories through the very materials that have shaped Malaysia today. Yong holds an MFA in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a BS in Astrophysics and Photojournalism from St. Cloud State University. His personal work has been shown at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Gould Library and Boliou Hall at Carleton College, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Art at 801 Gallery, and Soo Visual Arts Center. His collective work with CarryOn Homes has been exhibited in numerous venues across Minnesota, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center. Yong is the recipient of the 2020/21 MCAD-Jerome Fellowship for Early Career Artists and the 2019 MCBA/Jerome Foundation Book Arts Fellowship Series XV. He has taught photography and art courses at Carleton College, Augsburg University, and Normandale Community College. shunjyong.com