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. Offering supplemental and flexible support to directly address each fellow’s diverse set of needs, the initiative aims to develop sustainable structures for future generations of Boston arts practitioners.
Annually, the initiative awards three fellows with a $75,000 unrestricted grant and access to tailored artist support services.
More on how fellows are selected and supported by Wagner Foundation.
Tomashi Jackson creates vibrant works combining practices of painting, printmaking, video, photography, fiber, and sculpture with archival research in areas of public infrastructure policy. This work interrogates the intersection of languages between visual art and political histories of segregation, voting rights, education, transportation, labor, and housing in the US and beyond.
Works by 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 an interdisciplinary artist who works across painting, sculpture, and biological media. In her hybrid works, she embraces distortion as a tool to deconstruct how we see what we see, and by extension, the complicated relationship between truth and sight.
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 is Associate Professor of Art at Boston University and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Yu-Wen Wu is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates the intersections of art, science, the natural world, and social and cultural issues. Her works include large-scale drawings, site-specific video installations, community-engaged practices, and public art. Yu-Wen’s works reflect her journey as an immigrant, exploring the complexities of global migration, displacement and the nuances of identity.
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. Her work is currently on view at the Rose Art Museum. Wu lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.
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. Visit her website to learn more.
Daniela Rivera’s practice is informed by experiences of displacement, memory, and cultural migration. Rivera builds, paints, and draws spaces that reject categorization and invite participants to share agency and vulnerability.
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. Visit her website to learn more.
Wen-ti Tsen was born in Shanghai, China to parents from two revolutionary families who overthrew the Qing Dynasty. They were rewarded with studies abroad in France, where they stayed for ten years: Tsen’s father studied literature, and his mother was the first Chinese woman to graduate from the Beaux-Arts Academy. The two returned to a thriving 1920-30’s Shanghai, but then war and revolution happened. Tsen’s father died, and his mother later moved her family to France. He grew up in Paris and London. In 1956, he began studying art in Florence and London. Later, he arrived to the US to study at the The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Tufts University. Upon graduating, he received a traveling fellowship and traveled for two years: by car from Paris to Karachi, and in Sri Lanka, Egypt, and Europe, painting and taking in the world. Returning to the US, with an oncoming Vietnam War, he became passionately involved with applying art to understanding colonialism, racial, and class inequalities. A teaching job let him live for three years in Beirut, which further deepened his awareness of global inequity. Upon returning to the US, he continued to make art that addressed social and class issues. He was committed to making a living as a union worker, first as a billboard painter, then, for thirty years, as a movie projectionist — a wage-earner in the flux of society’s economics.
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.
Administered by United States Artists, the fellows selection process begins with anonymous nominations by peers. A select group of nominees are then invited to apply, and a national jury of arts professionals choose the finalists based on their demonstrated artistic vision, contributions to the advancement of their respective fields, dedication to the Greater Boston area, and engagement with social issues and civic impact. Wagner Foundation gives final approval. The nominators and the jury differ from year to year.
Wagner Arts Fellows are supported with a $75,000 unrestricted grant and access to United States Artists’ supplemental artist services, which includes financial planning, tax advising, and career consulting.
In addition, the fellows are offered the opportunity participate in the Caira Art Editions program and are included in an annual Wagner Gallery exhibition.
In 2024, United States Artists began working closely with Wagner Foundation to meet with artists, curators, and arts administrators from across Boston to learn more about the local arts ecosystem and specific needs of the region’s artists. From this research they developed a nomination and application process to identify artists who have a significant commitment to the region and investment in social issues in their work, whether through research, materials, process, or aesthetics
Founded by Lucy Rosenburgh in late 2024, Caira Art Editions publishes prints in all media with a growing roster of Boston-area artists and printers. Caira’s aim in publishing is to support the artist in their exploration of a new material, while providing a new market. As Boston’s artists and institutions continue to garner recognition nationally and internationally, Caira encourages collectors to grow with the artists as active contributors to the arts community.
In partnership with Wagner Foundation and United States Artists, Caira Art Editions works with interested Wagner Arts Fellows to publish a new limited edition print.
Related Insights
