Jennifer Packer facts for kids

Jennifer Packer (born 1984) is an American painter and teacher who lives in New York City. She creates art that shows the experiences of Black Americans today. Her paintings often feature portraits of people she knows, pictures of flowers, and everyday objects. Packer uses oil paints and a style with loose, flowing brush strokes and a small number of colors.

Early Life and School

Packer was born and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She went to Tyler School of Art at Temple University. There, she earned her first college degree in fine arts in 2007. Later, in 2012, she graduated from Yale University with a master's degree in painting and printmaking.

Her Art Career

Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where Jennifer Packer studied before Yale University.

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

What Her Art Is About

Jennifer Packer's art is often inspired by movements for social justice. For example, her paintings of flowers can show the sadness and unfairness that Black Americans have faced.

In her portraits, she paints friends and family in a very personal way. These paintings are meant to make you think, not just see one simple meaning.

• In 2013, she made art like Lost In Translation. These pieces showed parts of bodies, like fingers or knees, coming out of a blurry background.
• In 2017, her painting Transfiguration (He's No Saint) showed a young Black man with glasses and his arms raised. His body is painted in bright yellow, red, and green. This painting shows how police might stop and search a Black man. The circles on his skin can mean marks of suffering. His half-closed eyes suggest a feeling of loss.
• The Mind Is Its Own Place (2020) is a charcoal drawing. It uses only a few colors to show feelings of sadness and the complex thoughts people have.

Where Her Art Is Set

Packer's art often focuses on African Americans and themes of togetherness. Her work is political because it shows the problems and unfairness that people see or experience today. Even though her art doesn't cover all social injustices, it helps people understand inequality in the United States.

One of her early works, Visually Impaired, shows ideas of understanding and abstract art. In some of her 2017 paintings, 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 forest and was made to remember important events. Packer often includes small hints in her early works that refer to other artists who inspired her. She usually draws human figures with many realistic details.

How She Creates Art

Packer paints in a style called expressionist art. This means her paintings show feelings and ideas more than exact reality. She creates portraits (pictures of people), scenes inside rooms, and still life (pictures of objects like flowers or fruit).

She is very interested in showing real feelings and connections 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 expressionist paintings were 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 made to remember the death of Sandra Bland.
• Her other portraits show inspiration from famous artists like Henri Matisse and Caravaggio, as well as American artists Kerry James Marshall and Philip Guston.

Packer's work was also part of a traveling art show in 2019 called Young, Gifted, and Black.

Art Shows

Jennifer Packer's art has been shown in many places:

• A group show called Fore at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2012.
• Her first solo show, Treading Water, in London in 2015.
• A solo show, Jennifer Packer: Tenderheaded, at The Renaissance Society in Chicago in 2017, and later at the Rose Art Museum in 2018.
• A solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in 2018. Here, she showed a large painting called Laquan. It was a colorful still life of palm leaves and bright flowers, named after Laquan McDonald.
• The 2019 Whitney Biennial, a big art exhibition in New York City.
• A solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2020.
• A solo show, Jennifer Packer: Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2021.
• A solo show, Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 2021.
• A solo show, Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2021.

Awards and Special Programs

Jennifer Packer has received several awards and been part of special art programs:

• In 2013, she won 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 for a time.
• 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. This new piece was 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.