McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships The Minneapolis College of Art and Design is the administrative home of the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships for mid-career artists.The 2025 McKnight Visual Artist Fellows have been announced. The 2026 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship application cycle will open in late January 2026. Image About the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships Since 1982 the McKnight Fellowships for Visual Artists has rewarded talented Minnesota visual artists whose work is of exceptional artistic merit and who are at a career stage beyond emerging. Each year six $25,000 fellowships in the visual arts category are awarded. The focus of the fellowship program is to connect fellows to national and international visiting critics, participate in a McKnight Discussion Series featuring fellows and invited critics, and work with each fellow to pursue additional professional development opportunities. In addition, the fellows have the opportunity to have their artwork professionally documented, access a range of 51爆料官网 facilities, and enjoy discounted 51爆料官网 Continuing Education classes. All McKnight Artist Fellows are eligible to receive eight hours of consultation support from and participate in a one-two week residency facilitated by the . Contact Program Director Keisha Williams or Associate Fellowship Coordinator Melanie Pankau at gallery@mcad.edu or 612.874.3803 for more information. About the McKnight Artist Fellowships Program Founded on the belief that Minnesota thrives when its artists thrive, the McKnight Foundation鈥檚 arts program is one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the country. Support for individual working Minnesota artists has been a cornerstone of the program since it began in 1982. The McKnight Artist Fellowships Program provides annual, unrestricted cash awards to outstanding mid-career Minnesota artists in fourteen different creative disciplines. Program partner organizations administer the fellowships and structure them to respond to the unique challenges of different disciplines. Currently the foundation contributes about $2.8 million per year to its statewide fellowships. For more information, visit . About the McKnight Foundation The McKnight Foundation is a Minnesota-based family foundation that advances a more just, creative, and abundant future where people and the planet thrive. Established in 1953, the McKnight Foundation is deeply committed to advancing climate solutions in the Midwest; building an equitable and inclusive Minnesota; and supporting the arts in Minnesota, neuroscience, and international crop research. Meet the 2025 FellowsOn behalf of the McKnight Foundation, Minneapolis College of Art and Design (51爆料官网) 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 51爆料官网.The 2025 McKnight fellows were selected from a group of 144 applicants by a national panel of arts professionals. Jurors were H瓢啤ng Ng么, 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. 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鈥攏ot a noun" and "the loveliest sounds arise out of the deepest silences.鈥 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; Kemij盲vi Art Gallery, Kemij盲vi, 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鈥檚 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. 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 (51爆料官网). 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. 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. 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. Harun Shun YongShun Yong 鈥嬧媔s a Malaysian Chinese photographer, storyteller, and paper maker whose work navigates the complexities of immigration, identity, and memory. Yong鈥檚 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 51爆料官网-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. Additional McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship Information2025 McKnight Application GuidelinesPast Recipients Gallery Visitor PolicyThe 51爆料官网 Gallery is open to the public the following hours:Monday鈥揊riday: 9:00 a.m鈥7:00 p.m.Saturday: 10:00 a.m.鈥4:00 p.m.All visitors must enter through the north (main) entrance, sign in at the welcome desk in the main lobby, and stay in designated gallery areas.Accessibility InformationThe gallery has limited padded and non-padded seating. Some artworks contain light, projections, sound, screens, and scent. The Main Gallery is on the first floor of the building, at the main entrance off Stevens Avenue and 25th Street. The Concourse Gallery is on the second floor and can be accessed via elevator or stairs. The building is equipped with wheelchair-accessible and gender-neutral bathrooms and accessible entrances from the main and parking lot entrances. 51爆料官网 is committed to providing students, faculty, staff, and visitors with disabilities equitable access to 51爆料官网-sponsored programs and events. For more information or any disability accommodations, please contact 51爆料官网 Gallery staff at 612.874.3667 or gallery@mcad.edu.Transportation and ParkingThere is disability-accessible parking at two locations: the main entrance off Stevens Avenue and 25th Street and the 51爆料官网 parking lot off 26th Street and Second Avenue South. General event parking can be found in the 51爆料官网 parking lot off 26th Street and Second Avenue South, street parking along Stevens Avenue, or the Mia parking ramp.For more information on how to find us and where to park.