10 of Minnesota's Best Contemporary Artists

Leslie Barlow’s larger-than-life oil paintings are eye-popping and complex; you must step back to breathe them in. In her loving depictions of neighbors and friends of all colors and shapes, she contours their humanity and the intersections of racial identity, community, and belonging in vibrant pigment.

Watch Leslie Barlow discuss her work.

Hazel Belvo is known for her 50-year exploration of a single tree, Manidoo-giizhikens — the 400-year-old cedar, known as Spirit Tree — which corkscrews up from the granite on the Grand Portage Ojibwe Reservation, on the shore of Lake Superior. A founding member of a pioneering feminist art collective in Minnesota, she paints and draws people, places, and things she loves, making you love them, too.

Coyotes in bras, rabbits in aprons, and foxes in tutus are among the creatures that populate Julie Buffalohead’s visual narratives. Like all great storytellers, the enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma connects the mythical with the everyday, using metaphor, wisdom and wit to coax profound insights about contemporary women’s duty and the commercialization of Native culture.

Rachel Breen is on a mission to startle us out of consumer complacency, particularly in the mega-polluting global textile industry. Using bits of discarded clothing — sleeves, collars, belt loops — she infuses her installations with the familiar while underscoring disposable apparel's human and environmental cost.

Humor and cosmic vibrations play central roles in Frank Big Bear’s work, which often addresses cultural identity and political and social conflict. Though the Ojibwe artist is best known for his psychedelic pencil illustrations, I gravitate to Big Bear’s collaged mosaic meditations, a reckoning with our nation’s whitewashed history and consumer culture.

If you were lucky enough to be invited to Seitu Jones’ culinary catalyst, “A Community Meal,” you would have shared a meal at a half-mile-long table with 2,000 neighbors. Such is the ambition and food-based civic engagement that the multi-disciplinary artist weaves into his art. His work addresses social injustice and is nourished by Black joy and radical love.

Nobody renders Minnesota’s farmlands as alluringly as Teo Nguyen; his low horizons yield ample sky and delicate rural expanses. So, too, do his abstracts — as active as his rural scenes are serene — beckon with their uncommon combination of hues. A native of Vietnam, Nguyen explores both his ancestral homeland and his adopted one with curiosity and painstaking care.

Bookmaker and Magnum photographer Alec Soth (rhymes with “both”) has a wanderer’s eye. His large-scale portraits of people and places are one part documentary, another part otherworldly. In both his exhibitions (now held at national and international venues) and clothbound books, he presents an incisive, arresting, sometimes funny, and always profound view of America.

Read Alec Soth's favorite things about Minnesota.

It’s not nice to call an artist quirky, but it's apt when one’s muse leans toward suburban auto-part stores. Caroline Swizcz makes watercolor monoprints with names like “Parking Lot Bonsai,” “Vapes,” and “Fresh Donuts Daily” (which I own!). Though playful, her work is rigorous and rapturously addictive, and her openings draw energetic crowds of fun folks.

I suppose every article about Dyani White Hawk must start by mentioning she’s a MacArthur Foundation Genius grantee — for good reason. A multi-disciplinary artist, Whitehawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) walks in the metaphorical footprints of Minnesota’s own late great modernist George Morrison (Ojibwe), arranging patterns that evoke Native traditions — like quillwork — into gorgeous, colorful abstractions. 

Her first major survey at the Walker Art Center, “Love Language,” runs through February 15, 2026. 

You be the judge! Every year, thousands of art critics fill the State Fair’s Fine Arts Building, which displays hundreds of works across all media by living Minnesotans. There’s not a chainsaw Yeti or decoupaged doodad in sight. A juried show, it’s one for which many serious artists apply — and sometimes get rejected. 

The Minnesota Museum of American Art even has a special fund to purchase an artwork each year from the show. One participant called it “one of the biggest and most intense art experiences of the year in the Twin Cities” — which is almost right. 

Really, it’s the state’s biggest and most intense art experience of the year.

Read more about Minnesota's striking museums & galleries scene.