Lester Julian Merriweather (b. 1978) is a Memphis-based visual artist. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, holds an MFA from the Memphis College of Art, and a BA from Jackson State University. Merriweather has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. at various venues such as the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (MO), Tops Gallery, Crosstown Arts, and Powerhouse (Memphis, TN), DiverseWorks (Houston, TX), Stella Jones Art Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Tri-Star Arts (Knoxville, TN), and Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA). He has also exhibited internationally at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw, Poland) and the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands).

Merriweather served as the first Curatorial Director of the Jones Gallery and the Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Memphis from 2010-2016. He also previously served on the Board of Directors for the Number, Inc. independent journal, where he created the Art of the South exhibition series. Additionally, he is a founding member of the ArtsMemphis Artist Advisory Council and the artsAccelerator Grant Panel, and served as the Curatorial Consultant for the PPF Contemporary Art Collection, which is currently housed at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (Memphis, TN).

Merriweather was a 2022 Tri-Star Arts/ Current Art Fund grantee, a regional regranting program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. And, he was most recently featured in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which traveled to the Frist Art Museum (Nashville, TN), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX), and the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.).

Lester Merriweather's collages use imagery from printed advertising material in fashion and lifestyle magazines. In re-contextualizing these images, Merriweather examines ads and media materials that promote notions of racial prominence and inferiority.