Auction at MCAD: Live Auction Artists At this year’s Live Auction, we are celebrating the talent of five distinguished women artists within the MCAD community, led by Live Auction Director Rob Sherer of The Orange Advisory. Selected artists include Leslie Barlow ’16, MFA, Sara Suppan ’15, Pao Houa Her ’09, and faculty member Kim Benson. The proceeds support MCAD students in need of some form of scholarship or financial aid. Be inspired by these remarkable stories, and get ready to make an impact by raising your paddle.Email events@mcad.edu to schedule an appointment to preview the artwork in person and secure your tickets to bid today! Look for more Live Auction video features throughout April. Image Live Auction Feature: Sara Suppan ’15 LESLIE BARLOW ’16, MFALeslie Barlow is an artist living and working on occupied Očeti Šakówin and Wahpekute land now known as Minneapolis. Her life-size oil paintings serve as both monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship. Carolina, on Lake Street, 2019Oil, pastel, acrylic on panel60 x 48 x 2.5 inchesValue: $12,000Artist statement: This painting is from the Within, Between, and Beyond series (first exhibited at Minneapolis Institute of Art 2021). In this body of work I celebrate polyvocality, the power of many voices to shift and sustain narrative change. From 2019 - 2020 I connected with and interviewed participants for this series. The resulting sixteen portrait paintings and corresponding documentary videos invite us to hold space for, recognize, and reconsider our presumptions about race. The title of this exhibition came from an essay on multiracial identity by Maria P.P. Root, which asks us to consider the contradictions and questions that arise in a country going through an identity crisis layered with historical amnesia.Learn more about Leslie Barlow. KIM BENSONKim Benson (b. 1986, Denver, CO) received her MFA from University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her BFA from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, MN. Benson’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including Walker Art Center, Plains Art Museum, and North Dakota Museum of Art. In addition to her most recent solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Benson’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions at TOA Presents (Minneapolis, MN), MANA Contemporary (Jersey City, NJ), Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend, WI), Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), Rochester Art Center (MN) and NADA Chicago Invitational. She has enjoyed residences at La Macina di San Cresci, Adams State University, McCanna House with the North Dakota Museum of Art, Jentel Foundation, and The Soap Factory. Benson lives and works in Minneapolis, where she is an adjunct professor at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Radix, 2025Oil on lace fabric over panel15.75 x 13 x 1 inches Value: $5,500Artist statement: Radix (2025) is part of the “tile text” paintings developed through formal meditations on tightly cropped images of hands, artist’s palette, and books from the work of 15th-century Renaissance artist El Greco. This painting sources from a detail of his painting, Penitent Magdalene (1610), one of his many depictions of Mary Magdalene. Working the detail of her hand and book through additive and subtractive strategies, the abstracted imagery in the painting resolves differently depending on the distance and vantage point of the viewer. My approach reflects the way that history, time, looking and the process of making continually shifts, affecting our interpretation, memory, and understanding of images.Learn more about Kim Benson. PAO HOUA HER ’09Pao Houa Her is a Hmong American artist whose practice engages primarily with legacies and potentials of landscape, portraiture, and documentary photographic traditions and aesthetics, creating works that examine identity, longing, and belonging in Hmong diasporic communities. Her is an assistant professor in Photography and Moving Images at University Minnesota. She holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University School of Art (2012) and a BFA in Photography from Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2009). She is the recipient of many fellowships and grants, and her works are found in public collections across the United States and Southeast Asia. Jungle Fire, 20173D lenticular printPrinted 2021, 1/5, edition of 5 + 2 AP32 x 40 inchesValue: $7,000Artist statement: My grandfather turned into a tiger (2016–17) takes inspiration from a family tale of my grandfather’s reincarnation as a tiger, and combines landscapes and portraits from both Laos and Minnesota to create a broad cosmology inspired by Hmong folkloric narratives. The original family story goes that the morning after learning about her husband’s death in the Vietnam war, my grandmother found a dead boar on her doorstep. After that, there were sightings of a tiger around the village, and every so often the neighbors’ livestock would be left on her doorstep, leading my grandmother to believe that her husband, my grandfather, had come back to her after having been reincarnated as a tiger.Learn more about Pao Houa Her. SARA SUPPAN ’15Sara Suppan (b. 1994) is a painter living in Minneapolis. She has recently had solo shows with Micki Meng (San Francisco), Moosey (United Kingdom), and Weinstein Hammons (Minneapolis). She has participated in group exhibitions with Hashimoto Contemporary (New York, Los Angeles), Kutlesa (Switzerland), and Huxley-Parlour (London), among others. Sara has displayed at the NADA Miami, Untitled Miami, and CAN Ibiza art fairs with Micki Meng, Huxley-Parlour, and Moosey, respectively. She was a resident artist at Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria, 2019) and Moosey (United Kingdom, 2023). Suppan has been published twice in New American Paintings magazine (no. 155 and 173), and received multiple grants for her work. In October 2025 she will open her newest solo exhibition with Primary Projects in Miami. Suppan received her BFA in painting from Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2015). Rising Sun, 2023Oil on canvas24 x 18 x 1.5 inchesValue: $4,500Artist statement: I think about each of my paintings as a little handwave, or a hello. My images are light and strange and sometimes sweet. The everyday is my overarching subject matter—I lives alone, and the world of my apartment becomes the world of my paintings. They often include smiley faces, houseplants, mesmerizing repetition, and gestures of touch. The paintings depend on the contrast between my playful attitude and serious, labor-intensive rendering.Learn more about Sara Suppan ’15