Merrill Wagner (b. 1935, Tacoma, Washington) is an American artist whose work since the 1960s has occupied a position between painting, relief, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is characterized by a sustained engagement with abstraction, material specificity, and the relationship between constructed form and natural reference.
Wagner studied at Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1957, before moving to New York City in 1959 to attend the Art Students League. There she trained with Edwin Dickinson, Julien Levy, and George Grosz. By the time she completed her studies in 1963, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism had emerged as dominant artistic paradigms. Wagner responded to these developments with a practice that both engages and departs from their formal concerns, producing hard-edged abstract compositions that retain a subtle but persistent connection to landscape.
In the mid-1970s, Wagner shifted decisively away from canvas, adopting non-traditional supports such as slate, steel, and stone. These materials appealed to her not only for their tactile and visual qualities but also for their associations with geological processes and chance, informed by her upbringing in the Pacific Northwest. In her work, the support functions as an active compositional element rather than a neutral ground. Fragments are ordered, joined, and articulated through precisely calibrated applications of paint, forming structures that mediate between natural irregularity and constructed order.
Early solo exhibitions were held at the artist-run cooperative 55 Mercer in New York throughout the 1970s, followed by presentations at P.S.1 and The Clocktower, both part of the Institute for Art and Urban Resources. Subsequent solo exhibitions have taken place at Art Resources Transfer, New York (2002); William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey (2006), with the exhibition traveling to the University of Rhode Island (2007); Northern Columbia Community and Cultural Center, Benton, Pennsylvania (2011); the New York Studio School (2016); and the Große Kunstschau Worpswede, Germany (2019). Her work has also been included in significant group exhibitions at institutions such as the Neuberger Museum of Art, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the Tacoma Art Museum, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship (1989), the Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2002), the Andrew Carnegie Prize from the National Academy of Design (2006), and the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2006).
Wagner’s work is held in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Kunstmuseum Den Haag; and the Tacoma Art Museum.
Wagner lives and works in New York.