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L'Merchie Frazier

She // Her // Hers

Visual Artist, Activist, Public Artist and Historian, Poet, and Lecturer

Boston, MA

A Black woman with her hair in locs in a high ponytail smiles softly into the camera. She wears right red lipstick and gold earrings and sits in front of a colorful display of textiles.

Photo by Mel Taing.

My life work is one work. The images in the medium of fiber, beads, metals, poetry, performance, or work with community are threads of memory, reclaimed from the icons that bring recognition, salvation, redemption.”

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.

Donor -The Wagner Arts Fellowship is generously supported by Wagner Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 03.26.2025

A quilt with a surface resembling watercolor, primarily in blues and browns, depicts various faces, from the front and in profile, with their eyes closed. At the bottom are various weapons and outlines of bodies against ripple-like concentric circles.

The Holler by L’Merchie Frazier, 2019. Pieced nylon fabric, machine quilting, pellon, 30 × 40 inches.

Photo by Ryan Wallace, courtesy of Halsey McKay Gallery.

A quilt, rendered mostly in blues and grays, depicts a young Black boy in various situations: with his mother, who holds his face in her hands; at the top of a dark pool of water, reaching his hand up; and amidst many books. At the bottom of the quilt is a crowd, protesting with their fists up; a blue bird; and a gun with an X through it.

Just Us by L’Merchie Frazier, 2019. Pieced nylon fabric, machine quilting, pellon, silk photo transfer, 30 × 40 inches.

Photo by Ryan Wallace, courtesy of Halsey McKay Gallery.

A quilt depicts a Black man holding his child on a black background of concentric circles. Below them is a scene of seven children, holding hands and guided by an adult as they walk into a lush landscape.

Lale and the Children by L’Merchie Frazier, 2017. Pieced nylon fabric, machine quilting, 51.5 × 52 inches.

Photo by Ryan Wallace, courtesy of Halsey McKay Gallery.