<- Wagner Gallery

2026 Wagner Arts Fellows: Tomashi Jackson, Lucy Kim, and Yu-Wen Wu

  • August 19, 2026 - December 2, 2026
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Green graphic with large text: “Wagner Arts Fellows 2026.” Below, smaller text lists “Tomashi Jackson, Lucy Kim, Yu-Wen Wu.” Dates: “August 19, December 2” appear in the bottom left corner.
Designed by Cara Buzzell
  • Featured artists
    Tomashi Jackson
    Lucy Kim
    Yu-Wen Wu
  • Curated by

    Abigail Satinsky, Senior Program Officer & Curator, Art & Culture with Maggie Wong, Gallery Coordinator

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Wagner Gallery presents an exhibition celebrating the 2026 Wagner Arts Fellows, Tomashi Jackson, Lucy Kim, and Yu-Wen Wu: three Greater Boston artists with rigorous attention to materials and research-based practices that investigate the social, technological, and political conditions that shape contemporary life.

Tomashi Jackson grounds her vibrant, layered works in archival research into public infrastructure policy, combining painting, printmaking, sculpture, video, photography, and fiber. Her practice traces the intersections of color theory and political histories of segregation, voting rights, education, labor, transportation, and housing in the US and beyond. Lucy Kim builds her interdisciplinary practice on sustained scientific inquiry, working across painting, sculpture, and biological media including ink derived from live bacteria and melanin developed during her residency at the Broad Institute. Embracing distortion as a research tool, her hybrid works deconstruct how we see what we see, and by extension, the complicated relationship between truth and sight. Yu-Wen Wu‘s interdisciplinary practice draws on her experience of migration to investigate the intersections of art, science, the natural world, and social and cultural issues. Through large-scale drawings, site-specific video installations, community-engaged projects, and public art, she examines questions of global migration, displacement, and the nuances of identity and belonging.

Together, Jackson, Kim, and Wu reflect the depth and ambition of artists who have built nationally and internationally recognized careers while choosing Greater Boston as their creative home and community. The Wagner Arts Fellowship supports mid-career to established Greater Boston visual artists with a $75,000 unrestricted grant and tailored artist services in partnership with United States Artists, strengthening the region’s arts ecosystem and affirming the transformative power of artists as catalysts for social change, locally and beyond.

Large and small textured spheres in brown tones are connected as a long beaded chain, draped from a wall down onto a round white pedestal in a minimalist gallery space.
Yu-Wen Wu. “Recitations II,” 2026. Gilded, natural, painted tea, red thread. 108 x 50 x 49 in. Image by Will Howcroft, courtesy the artist. 
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Abstract black-and-white image resembling tall trees with textured, leafy canopies and soft, blurred edges, giving a dreamlike, watercolor effect. Patterns and shading create depth and a forest-like atmosphere.
Lucy Kim. “Orchid Pattern 2,” 2026. Melanin produced by genetically modified bacteria, paper. 30 x 38 in. Courtesy of the artist.
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A person sits on a stool against a wall with abstract pink, blue, and yellow art. They wear black clothes and a colorful, striped scarf over their head and shoulders. The scene is framed in a white picture frame.
Tomashi Jackson. “Second Day (Nia in The Emerald City),” 2022. C-print mounted on sintra, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York.
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Dried botanical specimens arranged in a grid pattern on a white background, each mounted separately in rows and columns within a rectangular frame.
Yu-Wen Wu. “Acculturation VII,” 2025. Gilded tea leaves. 40 x 40 in. Image by Will Howcroft, courtesy the artist. 
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Abstract black ink lines and shapes swirl and overlap vertically on a textured, smoky gray and white background, creating a sense of movement and layered depth.
Lucy Kim. “Vanilla Pattern 3,” 2026. Melanin produced by genetically modified bacteria, paper. 30 x 38 in. Courtesy of the artist.
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A colorful abstract textile with diagonal lines and vibrant hues drapes over a wooden frame. Beneath it, two orange and white patterned sheets rest against a wall, with white fabric at the frame’s base on a wooden floor.
Tomashi Jackson. “A Frustrating Paradox (The New Frontier),” 2022. Acrylic, Yule Quarry marble dust, and paper bags on acrylic yarn fiber with PVC marine vinyl mounted on a handcrafted wood frame, marble. 54 x 41 x 4 in. Courtesy of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York.
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Artists

A person with long, dark dreadlocks wearing a green shirt and layered necklaces looks calmly at the camera. The background features abstract patterns in green, cream, and pink.
Photo: Nik Massey

Works by Tomashi Jackson are in the collections of MOCA, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Perez Art Museum Miami; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. She was awarded the de Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum’s Rappaport Prize in 2023 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2020. Jackson’s work is represented by Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Pilar Corrias in London. Jackson lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

More about Tomashi’s work.

A woman with long dark hair and glasses smiles at the camera. She is wearing a patterned sweater with red and blue circular designs. The background is softly blurred.
Photo: Craig Bailey

Lucy Kim is a recipient of the 2024 Howard Foundation Fellowship, 2022 Creative Capital Award, 2019 Mass Cultural Council Grant, 2017 ICA Boston James and Audrey Foster Prize, 2014 Artadia Award, and the MacDowell Fellowship. She was an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University. Kim has exhibited her work at the Henry Art Gallery – University of Washington, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institute of Fine Arts at New York University; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, Massachusetts; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, Saratoga Springs, among others. Her work is in the collections of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, ICA Boston, KADIST collection, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the New York Public Library. Kim’s work is represented by Praise Shadows Gallery in Boston. Kim is Associate Professor of Art at Boston University and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

More about Lucy’s work.

A woman with shoulder-length dark hair and red cat-eye glasses smiles softly while wearing a black top and silver hoop earrings, standing in front of a light background with subtle decorations.
Photo: Mel Taing

Yu-Wen Wu was the 2024 Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. She was a recipient of the 2024 Trellis Art Fund, the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and of the Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in New Genre. Her work was recently on view at the Gardner Museum and as part of the Boston Triennial, and at Praise Shadows Art Gallery. She has received prominent public art commissions, including Lantern Stories (2020 and 2022) by the Greenway Conservancy, the Poetry of Reason at Tufts University, and a 2023 work through Now+There and Boston’s Transformative Art Grant, permanently on view at Boston City Hall. Wu’s work is represented by Praise Shadows Gallery in Boston. Wu lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. 

More about Yu-Wen’s work.

Abstract illustration featuring an eye shape with a brown circle as the iris, green and yellow geometric shapes above, and green intersecting shapes below, all on a light beige background.

Wagner Arts Fellowship

Wagner Foundation established the Wagner Arts Fellowship to strengthen Boston’s burgeoning arts community, celebrating the transformative potential of Boston artists to inspire social change both locally and beyond.

More about the Wagner Arts Fellowship