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“I am a visual activist, historian, poet, educator, and holographer who participates in the reparative narrative of human history.
I honor art-making as the highest form of that expression.”~ L'Merchie Frazier, TAP Artist-in-Residence
The Transformative Action Project (TAP) Artist-in-Residence Program offers a social engagement platform for renowned Boston-based artists whose works and practices reflect the resilience of the human spirit in the wake of trauma. In conjunction with mindfulness activities facilitated by Barbara Hamm, Co-Director of TAP, three Artists-in-Residence are currently engaging with audiences as part of its 2022 “Let Us” Workshop Series. Here, members of small groups are able to experience the benefits of their own creativity while also bearing witness to the artistic, mindful process of others - sparking new ideas, relieving feelings of isolation, and offering new perspectives.
TAP Artist-in-Residence L'Merchie Frazier is a multi-disciplinary artist in the service of the public who supports, generates, and strengthens the presence and impact of art in community. In public places with individuals and collective groups, she incubates new collaborations within the framework of a co-design model that affords the heightening of community participation.
TAP: Tell us about your creative practice. What inspires you to create?
LF: My family legacy captures the energy of art and healing through the work of my Grandfather, a tailor and embroidery artist, and my Mother, Theresa Frazier, a needlework artist, quilter and registered nurse. As a creative, I work in the practice of repair, healing and celebration of human triumph especially centered in the Black and Indigenous experience. No matter the medium, the generation of discussion to lift stories that participate in the reparative aesthetic is where I live. My work centers in the language of hope keeps me driven to produce and connect with others and to each other.
My fiber works that use transparent nylon is influenced by my experience with the study of holography. Holograms are prisms of layered light. My fascination with the layers of light begged the question of how to translate the layered light phenomena as a metaphor for our lives. I see us as complex layers of light. The interdisciplinary artwork that I produce involves the chronicling of history, people, places and events that happen in selected layers of time. My quilts and fiber constructions explore individual and collective memory as these layers are biographical and communal.
"I employ the five R’s in my work:
Reckon, Redefine, Reimagine, Repair and Restore
our history and ourselves."~ L'Merchie Frazier
TAP: Transformative Action Project's (TAP) Artist-In-Residence program asserts the creative process and mindful practice as complementary modalities to promote healing from trauma - which in turn opens pathways towards hope. How do you see your personal artistic practice in dialogue with transformative change?
LF: Participating as a multi-media artist and image-maker working in the public sphere offers me the opportunity to witness the impact, value, universality and unifying force of art and art making in real communities; to promote and participate in the on-going dialogue to secure the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of people through the medium of visual art. My quest is to engage with art to close the health and wealth gap facing us today. I am empowered to activate an audience to participate with me in a socially engaged practice. My work is invested in the art medium of fiber and stories based on historical imagination and contemporary voices. My artworks are created with the intentionality and striving to be aesthetically forceful, meaningful and culturally situated.
I employ the five R’s in my work: Reckon, Redefine, Reimagine, Repair and Restore our history and ourselves. The Transformative Action Project affords me the opportunity to fulfill this mission as we engage and lead our participants in a thoughtful process with mindfulness and artistic activities. We often see the impact of transformation in our participants happening as a workshop session progresses. Often there is an “Aha” moment.
"I see the relevance of the TAP Artist-in-Residence program as an accessible avenue for participants to experience a variety of methods and creative interventions from the lenses of creative artists. This is all in tandem with the idea of the TAP program as a change agent."
~ L'Merchie Frazier
Importantly today, we are all in a mode of stress and crisis due to the acts of violence that surround us locally, nationally and globally. An example of projects that support the Change Agency of TAP is my Hope Story Scrolls project that is centered in the language of hope. In these workshops we experience the space of hope together, in innovative space, to share the self and group continuity of healing. In my workshops, we utilize the art of collage to tell our stories of hope. The project was created to allow for unheard voices and sharing. Participants are engaged in the art form of collage made simple with household materials and other available resources to fabricate the scrolls.
Participants share their stories of transformation, make their scrolls and submit their images digitally, following on-line and on-going virtual platform workshop sessions. The workshops provide a moment of grounding, employing guided mindfulness, storytelling and art-making within a virtual space to support and reflect a "just" space where participants explore resistance and renewal. They reimagine what justice, hope and renewal looks like to them.
The Hope Story Scrolls Project is one which emphasizes the importance of self-continuity as an essential element of healing and is centered in the language of hope. Scrolls are symbolic of petitions that are instruments of resistance since the early 1600’s in America. Each participant will have the opportunity to reflect on their history and its arc of protest, affirmation and healing. The collage scrolls use accessible recycled materials in strip forms as visual petitions for survival and change. Participants share their stories of transformation, make their scrolls. They may submit their images digitally to be included in our on-line archive.
TAP: What advice would you offer to those who seek alternative strategies of confronting and overcoming personal challenges of living with anxiety, depression, and other manifestations of trauma?
LF: Change the focus. Honor the self you see reflected in the mirror. See your beauty. Turn to your true and creative self. We are all a part of the very large expansive Self that makes us significant. As we become more whole by mindful self-reflection and explore our creative force, we have the opportunity to transform and redirect our energy and to be more in touch with our true value. Share your stories with others. Know that you are global and not alone. Know that our stories share similar threads to the stories of others. This helps us to understand our humanity. As we share the master art of our stories we are becoming better. Imagine us as better. Let hope tap you on the shoulder.
TAP: As an artist, how do you sustain your creative practice during troubling times?
LF: First, I begin by being in tune with my “Star Player” that I see in the mirror reflected back at me. I realize that my life as well as my artistic practice is fragmented. I want to be whole in both as a creative human being. As I envision and relate to my community, I am mindful that the community and I, like water, share a connected collectivity to be whole and in that we are ever engaged in becoming. So my practice embraces this notion and sometimes when I least expect it, the power of that embrace shows up. Out loud! The Universe provides a way of greater sustenance and more sustainability than I could possibly imagine.
L'Merchie Frazier is an (b. Jacksonville, Florida) is a Boston based visual and performance artist /educator /consultant and currently serves as the Director of Education at the Museum of African-American History, Boston / Nantucket. Her work provocatively traverses the mediums of fiber, beads, metals, poetry, performance, or work with community, serving as threads of memory, reclaimed from the icons that bring recognition, salvation, redemption. Through her visual artwork she creates and has lauded support and praise for her evocative fiber and metal sculptures, innovative mixed media installations, hand-crafted beaded jewelry, and powerful quilt series, the “Quilted Chronicles.” L’Merchie has remained an active and pivotal member of the New England Community for over twenty years. Her work has been exhibited in the public and private collections of numerous institutions. Click here for the artist's website
The Transformative Action Project (TAP) is funded by the Massachusetts Office for Victim Assistance (MOVA) and is dedicated to serving individuals, groups and communities impacted by crime and violence.