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Gallery: Artist Leslie
Barlow poses for a photo in her studio with some of her paintings.
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LEILA NAVIDI – start Tribune
The sunlight streamed into Leslie Barlow’s
studio as she painted, illuminating the faces surrounding her. On one canvas, a
couple hold hands as they walk. Another pair sits together on a couch. In a
third painting, a couple gaze at their two children.
Everyday families doing everyday things.
Except that these families, unlike those typically depicted in oil portraits,
are interracial.
“I wanted to represent them as they are,”
said Barlow, 27, brush in hand, “and question our ideas of family normalcy.”
Barlow’s new exhibition, “Loving,” which
opens Saturday at Public Functionary in northeast Minneapolis, was inspired by
the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck
down laws banning interracial marriage, and the couple behind it: Mildred and
Richard Loving.
But the show’s 10 portraits are also
deeply personal.
The first multiracial couple Barlow ever
painted? Her parents. Her father, a musician, is mostly black, while her mother
is white. “I never saw families that looked like mine in paintings,” she said.
This exhibition, backed by a Minnesota
State Arts Board grant, is Barlow’s most ambitious, displaying her use of
vibrant colors, especially in skin tones, and drawing on themes of race and
identity that — not so long ago — she was hesitant to explore.
Barlow is “really well-trained,” building
portraits in layers of color, said Tricia Heuring, the director and curator of
Public Functionary. So it’s powerful when she uses those traditional techniques
and materials to portray people missing from the halls of museums, Heuring
said.
“It’s almost like a rewriting [of history]
when you use methods that come from the past.”
Barlow created the works while trying to
make sense of President Donald Trump’s election, between marches in Minneapolis
and Washington, D.C., while listening to audiobooks about race. On her laptop:
“Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah
and “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
Focusing on love between the people she
was painting helped, Barlow said. “Us coming together, the healing and love,
can be just as powerful as going out and kicking ass and protesting Trump,” she
said, talking in her Northrup King Building studio last week. “We can celebrate
the bridging of these divides.”
She turned to her assistant and laughed.
“That sounds a little Miss America,
doesn’t it?”
Playing with color
Barlow has thought about race her whole
life. But she hasn’t always painted about it.
“I was too nervous to have it become a
part of my work,” she said, “mostly because I didn’t have the language to talk
about my experience.”
That was partly because she had never had
a person of color as an art instructor. Not at the University of Wisconsin-Stout
in Menomonie, where she got her undergraduate degree, nor at the Minneapolis
College of Art and Design, where she earned an MFA in 2016.
Barlow’s assistant, Hannah Farrell, a
student at MCAD, looked up from a canvas to shake her head: “Me, neither.”
“Anna, have you?” Barlow called out to her
studio-mate. She, too, shook her head.
“So I wasn’t illuminated to artists of
color working with topics I was interested in,” Barlow continued. “We were
shown the typical one or two art stars, like Kara Walker, but nobody else
making work in between.”
At Stout, where there were few black art
students, she felt that people would expect her to make art about race. So
instead, she made art about gender. But after graduating, she began to realize
that “I didn’t have anything new to add to the gender conversation,” she said.
Then, in 2013, Cheerios came out with a TV
commercial: A curly-haired girl with a button nose comes into the dining room
with a box of cereal. “Mom?” she asks her mother, who is white. “Dad told me
that Cheerios is good for your heart. Is that true?”
Then we see her father, who is black,
awaking from a nap. On his chest — a pile of cereal.
The ad ends with a single word: “Love.”
But it generated a lot of hate. The ugly, online furor surprised Barlow, who
was “obsessed” with the ad and its family, who looked a lot like hers. She
wanted to unpack why this commercial — “which wasn’t about race” — could ignite
such backlash. “Why are people so upset about this normal representation of
this family?”
The world needs more images of multiracial
people doing everyday things, she decided. “At that point I realized, ‘There’s
something here,’ ” she said. “I could push that conversation further.”
Thus began her “Other/Identity” series. In
“Three Black Girls,” a piece from 2013, three women sit together, staring back
at the viewer. Their faces, painted in rich tones, pick up the bright colors in
their shirts. Barlow, on the right, is flecked in gold.
‘This is your story’
On a recent afternoon, Barlow stepped back
from the painting: a woman and her two daughters, standing in the snow beneath
a purple sky. She turned her head left, then right. The snow was missing
something.
“That’s right,” she said suddenly. “I was
going to do green.” Barlow loaded her brush with a light lime green and began
sweeping it across chunks of snow.
In the photo of the three figures,
displayed on the laptop beside her, the snow is gray. But Barlow plays with
color, letting objects and people reflect the hues around them. Same goes for
skin. “I stay as far away from the traditional peaches and browns as possible,”
Barlow said, “to refect the colors that really do reflect onto our skin.”
She looked down at her own arm, shifting
it in the light. Her hair fell from behind her ear, its ends dyed the same
bright green.
Barlow first invited Heuring to her studio
two years ago, excited to talk with a female curator who, too, is mixed-race.
Having one white parent “positions you differently in the world,” Heuring said.
“There is a different set of awarenesses of who you are and where you fit.”
At the time, Barlow was “really hesitant
about painting about race,” Heuring said. But Heuring encouraged her: “Yes,
this is your story, this is your truth.”
Growing up in south Minneapolis, Barlow
knew Loving v. Virginia not from a textbook — but as “something my parents always
talked about.” The Lovings, in 1958, were convicted of miscegenation, a felony.
At the time of Supreme Court oral arguments, nearly a decade later, 17 states
still had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The case inspired the 2016
film, “Loving.”
“People wonder, ‘Why are there so many
racial tensions now?’ ” Barlow said. “When you start to realize that a lot of
these laws existed into the 1960s. ... ” She paused, shaking her head. “My parents were kids during this time.
“It’s very ingrained, this idea that we
are different.”
In “Just a Car Ride,” a 2016 portrait of
her parents, Barlow placed the couple in their car — the space where they’ve
encountered the most racism. For “Loving,” Barlow used oil paints, pastels,
charcoal and fabric to depict families in their happy places: living rooms,
bedrooms, their front stoop.
On one raw canvas, a couple sit on a bed,
nuzzling each other, their baby in their arms. Behind them, pink light warms a
teal wall. Their smiling faces are precise, detailed. But their legs blend into
the quilt beneath them, creating a feeling of union.
When Alissa Paris first saw the image —
her image — she cried.
“I’m grateful to have a little moment of
my life captured,” she said, “there for my grandchildren to see and there for
me to reflect on.”
Paris, 29, and Barlow met through a
mixed-race discussion group. Her mother is half Puerto Rican and part German,
while her father is mostly African-American. She and her partner at the time,
Jared, are “second-generation mixed,” she said, and were honored that Barlow
wanted to feature them because of that multiracial identity.
Barlow’s work is “fine art,” Paris said,
“but it’s also oral history.”
“I think a lot of mixed people are
allowing other people to tell their stories — to guess at their stories,” she
said. In contrast, “Leslie’s inviting us to be part of that history and telling
of our story.”
