Jennifer Packer facts for kids

Jennifer Packer, born in 1984, is an American artist who paints amazing pictures. She also teaches art in New York City. Her paintings often show scenes from everyday life for Black Americans, including portraits of people, rooms, and even flowers. She carefully paints pictures of her friends, family, and even special flower arrangements. Jennifer mostly uses oil paints. Her style is free and expressive, with bold brush strokes and a few main colors.

Jennifer Packer's Early Life and Education

Jennifer Packer grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She went to the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and earned her first art degree in 2007. Later, in 2012, she got her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking from Yale University.

Jennifer Packer's Art Career

Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Jennifer Packer's first college before going to Yale University.

After finishing her master's degree, Jennifer Packer moved to the Bronx. She later became a professor, teaching painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Today, she is an assistant professor at Cooper Union, another art school.

Meanings in Jennifer Packer's Art

Jennifer Packer gets ideas for her art from social justice movements. These are groups that work to make society fair for everyone. You can see this in her paintings of flowers, which sometimes show the sadness and pain caused by unfair treatment of Black Americans.

When she paints portraits, she shows her friends and family in a very personal way. She wants you to think deeply about the painting, not just see it simply. For example, in 2013, she made art showing parts of bodies, like fingers or jaws, coming out of a blurry background. One of these is called Lost In Translation.

In 2017, her painting Transfiguration (He's No Saint) shows a young African-American man with glasses and his arms raised. Most of his body is painted in bright yellow, red, and green colors. This painting is about preventing a Black man from being unfairly stopped by the police. Circles on his skin can mean marks of suffering. His eyes are partly closed, showing a feeling of loss or disappointment.

The Mind Is Its Own Place (2020) is a charcoal drawing that uses only a few colors. It shows how complicated and sometimes sad the human mind can be.

What Jennifer Packer's Art Is About

Jennifer Packer's paintings often feature African Americans, and her main ideas are about togetherness. Her art is political because it shows the disagreements and problems that people face in the world today. Even though her art doesn't show all social problems, it helps people understand unfairness in the United States.

Visually Impaired is one of her early works. It shows ideas about understanding and abstract art. It is similar to 19th-century paintings made by Ferdinand Holder about people on their deathbeds. In some of her 2017 art, she wanted to create strong differences in light and dark, and a feeling of depth.

Say Her Name is an oil painting of flowers. It looks like a growing flower in a forest. This painting was made to remember the death of Sandra Bland. Jennifer Packer has said that in many of her early works, she likes to include a small hint or reference to an artist from the past who inspired her. She often paints human figures with very realistic details.

How Jennifer Packer Creates Art

Jennifer Packer paints expressionist portraits, scenes of rooms, and still life (paintings of objects like flowers or fruit). She is interested in showing real feelings and experiences in her paintings. The people she paints in her portraits are often her friends or family members.

In her 2020 art show in London, all her expressive paintings were made with oil on canvas. Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) shows her feelings about the killing of Breonna Taylor. Another flower painting, Say Her Name, was used to remember the death of Sandra Bland. Other portraits show ideas from famous artists like Henri Matisse and Caravaggio, as well as American artists Kerry James Marshall and Philip Guston.

Her work was also part of a traveling art show in 2019 called Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art.

Selected Exhibitions

• Group show, Fore, 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
• Solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co (2018); Packer showed a large painting called Laquan, which was a colorful still life of palm leaves and bright flowers. It was named after Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager who was killed by a Chicago policeman in 2014.
• 2019 Whitney Biennial, a big art show in New York City
• 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

Awards and Fellowships

In 2013, Jennifer Packer received the Rema Hort Mann Grant. From 2012 to 2013, she was an Artist-in-Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. This means she lived and worked at the museum as an artist. From 2014 to 2016, she was a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In 2020, she won the Hermitage Greenfield Prize. This award included money to create a new artwork, which will be shown in 2022 at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. Packer also won the Rome Prize in 2020 from the American Academy in Rome. She was a Rome Prize Fellow from January 11 to August 6, 2021.