Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer (born 1984) is a contemporary American painter and educator based in New York City. Packer's subject matter includes political portraits, interior scenes, and still life featuring contemporary Black American experiences. She paints portraits of contemporaries, funerary flower arrangements, and other subjects through close observation. Primarily working in oil paint, her style uses loose, improvisational brush strokes, and a limited color palette. She attended Tyler School of Art at Temple University where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2007. In 2012, she graduated from Yale University with a Master of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking. She is currently an assistant professor at Cooper Union.

Themes within art

Packer has been inspired by social justice movements, which can be seen through her floral work representing institutional violence against Black Americans and the resulting grief. shows a young African-American man wearing glasses with two raised arms. The majority of his body is rendered dramatically in brilliant yellow, red, and green. This work represents the prevention of a stop and search of a Black man by police. Circular parts on his flesh signify the marks of stigmata. The figure's eyes are half closed, indicating loss of what he is or expects out of the world. The Mind Is Its Own Place (2020) shows a level of depression and complexity of the human mind within her work through a limited palette in a charcoal drawing.

Settings on art

Packer's subjects are African Americans, and her themes center around oneness. Her art is political, recognizing the social discord all people witness or are affected by in this generation. Despite her art not focusing on the entirety of social injustice, it does bring awareness to inequality within the United States. Visually Impaired is one of her early works which expresses realization and abstraction. It intends to resemble Ferdinand Holder's 19th century deathbed art pieces. In some of her 2017 artwork, she aimed to achieve contrast and depth. Say Her Name, a flower oil canvas piece, is another example, created as a growing flower drawn like a forest. She is interested in authenticity, encounters, and exchanges in relation to her painting practice. The models for her portraits are often friends or family members.

She was included in the 2019 traveling exhibition Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art.

Selected exhibitions Group show, Fore, curated by Lauren Haynes, Naima J. Keith and Thomas J. Lax at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2012 Solo exhibition, Treading Water, Corvi-Mora, London, 2015 Solo exhibition, Jennifer Packer: Tenderheaded, The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2017; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, 2018 2019 Whitney Biennial, curated by Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta Solo exhibition, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2020 Solo exhibition, Jennifer Packer: Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2021 Solo exhibition, Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 2021 Solo exhibition, Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2021 Solo exhibition, Jennifer Packer: Dead Letter, Sikkema Malloy Jenkins Gallery, New York, New York, 2025

Awards and Fellowships In 2013, Packer was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Grant. and from 2014 to 2016, a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In 2020, she won the Hermitage Greenfield Prize, which included a commission to produce a new work that will premiere in 2022 at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.