2026 Cycle I
Inaugural Meridian Award
Wen Liu
Winner
Wen Liu is a Brooklyn-based visual artist whose work across sculpture, installation, and mixed media explores migration, memory, absence, loss, and the limits of language. Working primarily through mold making and casting, she considers transformation, survival, and the ways a form can be preserved through rupture. Her sculptures draw on the natural process of molting, in which a former skin is shed in order to grow, and on her own experiences of migration and adaptation.
In her ongoing series Inarticulate Trace, Liu incorporates Chinese herbal medicines prescribed during a period of grief and healing following the death of her father. By embedding these materials into the work, she preserves physical traces of care, treatment, and embodied memory while considering how pain is described, communicated, and understood across languages.
Liu is a 2026 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Chicago Cultural Center, Roswell Museum, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, and the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.
Matt Bollinger
Finalist
Matt Bollinger is a New York–based artist whose paintings center on working-class life, family relationships, masculinity, and small-town America. His work develops around Holmes, Missouri, a fictional town informed by the Missouri communities where he grew up and the rural landscape of upstate New York, where he now lives. Its residents are drawn from family members, people he knew growing up, and figures connected to the everyday life of the region. Through scenes of work, family, and community, Bollinger creates a portrait of rural American experience grounded in personal memory.
Bollinger received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Dublin, and London, with museum exhibitions at the Akron Art Museum, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, South Bend Museum of Art, Schneider Museum, and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole. He has received two NYFA Fellowships in Painting and participated in residencies including the Fine Arts Work Center and Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. He is represented by mother’s tankstation and François Ghebaly Gallery.
Andrius Anvarez-Backus
Finalist
Andrius Alvarez-Backus is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, drawing, and painting. Through mixed media assemblage and lifecasting, he transforms familiar objects and bodily forms to explore intimacy, embodiment, desire, and the cultural meanings carried by materials. Household objects are combined with sand, Manila palm leaves, and wood, connecting the work to his experiences as a gay Filipinx-American. Using his own body as subject and material, Alvarez-Backus moves between exposure and concealment while questioning expectations of visibility and legibility.
Alvarez-Backus received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2023 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2025. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Wallach Art Gallery, Gallery Vacancy, Eli Klein Gallery, Fragment Gallery, Nguyen Wahed, and The Blanc. His first museum solo exhibition was presented at the Fitchburg Art Museum in 2023, where his work is also held in the permanent collection. He was the inaugural Nicholas Dahl Visiting Artist at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2025 and is an artist-in-residence at Smack Mellon from 2025 to 2026.