Wagner Arts Fellowship

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.

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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.

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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.