Wagner Foundation Names Tomashi Jackson, Lucy Kim, and Yu-Wen Wu as 2026 Arts Fellows
Three Boston-based artists whose work moves between civic urgency and formal invention have been selected for the Wagner Foundation’s 2026 Arts Fellowships. The foundation has awarded Tomashi Jackson, Lucy Kim, and Yu-Wen Wu an unrestricted $75,000 each, along with tailored professional support designed to strengthen their practices.
The fellows’ work will be presented together in a group exhibition at the Wagner Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, running from August to December 2026.
Now in its second year, the Wagner Arts Fellowship was launched in 2025 and is awarded annually to three visual artists based in the greater Boston area whose practices engage with social change. The 2026 cohort reflects that mandate through distinct, research-driven approaches: Jackson’s materially layered compositions that confront systemic injustice; Kim’s hybrid studio-lab works that merge microbiology with painting and sculpture; and Wu’s large-scale drawings and site-specific video installations that probe migration, identity, science, and the natural world.
Cambridge-based multimedia artist Tomashi Jackson works across painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and textiles, building three-dimensional surfaces from layered paper, embroidery, plastics, photo transfers, and other materials. Her work has been the subject of institutional solo presentations at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Parrish Art Museum, and the Neuberger Museum of Art, and has appeared in group exhibitions at the Phillips Collection, the Guggenheim Museum, and the High Museum of Art. Jackson is represented by Pilar Corrias, Night Gallery, and Jack Tilton Gallery.
Korean-American interdisciplinary artist Lucy Kim brings scientific process into dialogue with painterly and sculptural form, incorporating materials such as silicone rubbers, resins, and live bacterial cells. Her work examines how perception is shaped, and often distorted, by cultural inheritance and assumption. Kim received the 2024 Howard Foundation fellowship in the emerging arts and the 2022 Creative Capital Award. Her work has been shown at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Jessica Silverman Gallery, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is an associate professor of art at Boston University and is represented by Praise Shadows.
Taiwan-born, Boston-based Yu-Wen Wu is known for large-scale drawing and site-specific video installations that connect personal and collective histories to broader systems, from ecology to scientific inquiry. She was selected as the 2024 artist in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and received the James and Audrey Foster prize in 2023, which included a solo exhibition at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Her work has also been shown at the Harvard Art Museum, the Acropolis Museum, and the National Museum of American History.
“We are proud to continue investing in Boston’s ever-evolving creative community and to highlight artists whose creative practices meaningfully shape the cultural legacy of this city,” said Charlotte Wagner, the foundation’s president and founder, in a press statement. She added that the foundation remains committed to “amplifying artists’ contributions and sustaining the ecosystems that allow art to thrive,” emphasizing the role artists play in Boston and in the national cultural landscape.
With unrestricted funding still relatively rare in the visual arts, the Wagner Foundation’s fellowships arrive as both a material vote of confidence and a public platform, culminating in the Cambridge exhibition that will place three sharply different practices into conversation later this year.
