"First and foremost, I'm Black"

L'Merchie Frazier stitches her art with Black history

L’Merchie Frazier, Lale and the Children, 2017. Pieced nylon fabric, machine quilting, 51.5 x 52 inches. Courtesy Halsey McKay Gallery.

Black history, technological innovation, and timelessness all come together in L’Merchie Frazier’s artwork. I visited L’Merchie last week in her studio at Northeastern’s African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program in Jamaica Plain. The building, an old book depository, seemed creaky but homey; some artists, including L’Merchie, have been there more than 20 years. The overhead lights are dim in her studio; she mostly works on her big sewing machines at home.

L’Merchie was recently awarded one of three $75,000 Wagner Arts Fellowships for mid-career Boston-area artists who are shoulder-deep in the community (the other two are Daniela Rivera and Wen-ti Tsen).

Needlework is in L’Merchie’s blood: Her grandfather was a tailor in West Virginia; her mother followed in his footsteps. As the artist tells it, “Mama just claimed, she said, ‘No, I'm not an artist. I just like beautiful things.’ But she was a beader from the 1940s. Hence beadwork was a part of my discipline.” The two even collaborated for a 2013 show celebrating the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation at the Museum of African American History in Boston.

“She did hand quilting and I did machine quilting,” L’Merchie said. “She did the Underground Railroad quilt codes in silk.”

The artist’s work chronicles Black history, Black courage, and Black nobility. Among the quilts on view in her AAMARP studio, she spotlights poet, abolitionist, lecturer, and suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ethiopian activist Lale Labuko, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But she’s not simply a quiltmaker. She’s a practiced holographer; she’s about to unveil “Call and Response,” a metal sculpture at a new Roxbury firehouse; she’s a poet and performance artist. Oh, and she’s executive director of creative strategies and partnerships at SPOKE.

I asked her if she had time for self-care. Not really, she said. L’Merchie is a warrior and a truth-teller, and truth is under siege these days.

“This is another cycle for me,” Frazier said. “It’s an ongoing struggle since 1492.”

There’s more to read in this week’s Working Artist story in the Globe.

Before I left, I asked L’Merchie who, as a human, she came here to be. I wasn’t quick with my phone, and the recording didn’t capture the very beginning of her answer: “Well, first and foremost, I’m Black.”