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.
Artists
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, NY; 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.
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, WA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, New York, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, Saratoga Springs, NY 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.
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.
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