Merrill Wagner

Northwest native Merrill Wagner received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1957 followed by several years of further study at the Art Students League, New York. During the 1960s she began working in a minimalist abstract style that she has continued to explore throughout her career. Wagner’s work has been included in over fifty individual and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad and her work is in both public and private collections in Europe and the United States. She also has self published five different books including A Calendar (1983), Notes on Paint (1990) and Time and Materials (1995). Wagner received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant in 1989 and the Andrew Carnegie Prize from the National Academy of Design in 2006 among other honors.

Merrill Wagner has long been fascinated with the use of nontraditional materials. She has experimented with painting and drawing on stone, steel, and slate often incorporating the patterns inherent in the material, or marks and blemishes on the surface into her compositions. For most of her career, she has worked primarily in an abstract vocabulary that has become increasingly minimalist with time.

For further information and artworks visit the artist’s website: http://www.merrillwagner.com/

[accessed Jan. 2021]

[source: artist’s resume, TAM files]