Founded and supported by Wagner Foundation and administered by United States Artists, the Wagner Arts Fellowship has been awarded to three contemporary visual artists working in Greater Boston to illuminate issues confronting society and transform our understanding of social change. The recipients of the 2025 Wagner Arts Fellowship are: L’Merchie Frazier, Daniela Rivera, and Wen-ti Tsen.
L'Merchie Frazier is a visual activist, fiber and public artist, historian, lecturer, poet, and Executive Director of SPOKE ART. Frazier previously served as the Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket and the Director of Creative Engagement for Violence Transformed. She is a lifelong member of The Women of Color Quilter’s Network and resident artist of the African American Master Artists-in-Residency Program at Northeastern University. Recently, she co-taught a graduate course on textile texts in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Her innovative art practice supports social and reparative justice, and the quest for civil and human rights through the lens of five hundred years of Black and Indigenous history. She is a Boston Foundation Brother Thomas Fellow, a mayoral appointee to Boston’s Reparations Task Force, and a gubernatorial appointment to the State of Massachusetts Art Commission. Frazier’s residencies in Brazil, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Africa, France, and Cuba feature public community projects. Her permanently collected works are in the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery, the White House, Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design, and she was a 2023 Boston Celtics Heroes Among Us Awardee. Her selected interviews of literary and visual artists, recorded by GBH Forum Network, include Claudia Rankine and Dr. Margaret Burnham. Frazier's work appears in many publications including Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters.
She received her BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996, and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston in 2006. She is currently Professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College. She has exhibited in Latin America, and the United States, and has been awarded residencies at Loghaven, Headland Center for the Arts, Surf Point, Proyecto'ace in Buenos Aires, Vermont Studio Center, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has received notable fellowships and grants including The Chiaro Award, The Rappaport Prize, Now + There, Mass Cultural Council Award, VSC, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Fondo Nacional para el Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes (FONDART), and the St. Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Matucana 100 (Santiago), San Francisco Art Commission, Fitchburg Art Museum, The Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Proyecto'ace (Buenos Aires), and a public art project as part of the Now + There Accelerator Fellowship.
As time moved on, and political affinities splintered, Tsen drifted more and more into making art on Asian American issues, and those that dealt with working people's lives.
Visit his website to learn more.
