Jennifer Packer
(b. 1984)
Derived from encounters with family and friends, Jennifer Packer’s intimate portraits celebrate, defend, and memorialize Black lives.
Biography
Through portraiture, still lifes, and interior scenes, Jennifer Packer depicts the strength of her Black subjects.
She was born on a naval base in Philadelphia, and lived in southern New Jersey with her grandparents for most of her childhood. Upon the suggestion of a high school teacher, she applied and enrolled at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Despite intending to study graphic design, she took her first painting class with Stanley Whitney, who influenced her thinking about art as a means of communication and source of responsibility. He encouraged her to study abroad in Rome. When she arrived in Italy in 2005, she experienced profound racism. Still, art remained a source of comfort. She knew she wanted to be a painter following a formative encounter with Caravaggio’s “Saint Matthew” series (1599–1601) in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi.
In the final year of her MFA at the Yale School of Art, Packer was dissatisfied with much of her output. As a creative outlet, she painted small, loose portraits of her friends who visited her studio in the early hours of the morning. While she initially saw this exercise as separate from the broader aims of her painting practice, it soon expanded into her primary mode of making and looking. In her colorful portraits that oscillate between figuration and abstraction, she aims to treat her subjects with tenderness, imbuing them dignity. Her subjects do not appear in service of or in deference to the viewer’s gaze: “I’m interested in personhood—that someone exists in that space, with me now, and is represented with integrity, as if the undeniable quality of their existence could be observed.”1 She has painted fellow artists such as Tomashi Jackson, Jordan Casteel, and Eric N. Mack, and has invoked references to Black victims of police violence including Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor.
Packer earned her BFA from Temple University and MFA from the Yale School of Art. She received a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2013); Visual Arts Fellowship, Fine Arts Work Center (2014); and John Kock Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2021). The Studio Museum has presented her work in exhibitions such as The Bearden Project (2012); Fore (2012); and Regarding the Figure (2017).
Exhibitions and Events
Jennifer Packer
(b. 1984)Derived from encounters with family and friends, Jennifer Packer’s intimate portraits celebrate, defend, and memorialize Black lives.
Ivan, 2013
Biography
Through portraiture, still lifes, and interior scenes, Jennifer Packer depicts the strength of her Black subjects.
She was born on a naval base in Philadelphia, and lived in southern New Jersey with her grandparents for most of her childhood. Upon the suggestion of a high school teacher, she applied and enrolled at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Despite intending to study graphic design, she took her first painting class with Stanley Whitney, who influenced her thinking about art as a means of communication and source of responsibility. He encouraged her to study abroad in Rome. When she arrived in Italy in 2005, she experienced profound racism. Still, art remained a source of comfort. She knew she wanted to be a painter following a formative encounter with Caravaggio’s “Saint Matthew” series (1599–1601) in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi.
In the final year of her MFA at the Yale School of Art, Packer was dissatisfied with much of her output. As a creative outlet, she painted small, loose portraits of her friends who visited her studio in the early hours of the morning. While she initially saw this exercise as separate from the broader aims of her painting practice, it soon expanded into her primary mode of making and looking. In her colorful portraits that oscillate between figuration and abstraction, she aims to treat her subjects with tenderness, imbuing them dignity. Her subjects do not appear in service of or in deference to the viewer’s gaze: “I’m interested in personhood—that someone exists in that space, with me now, and is represented with integrity, as if the undeniable quality of their existence could be observed.”1 She has painted fellow artists such as Tomashi Jackson, Jordan Casteel, and Eric N. Mack, and has invoked references to Black victims of police violence including Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor.
Packer earned her BFA from Temple University and MFA from the Yale School of Art. She received a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2013); Visual Arts Fellowship, Fine Arts Work Center (2014); and John Kock Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2021). The Studio Museum has presented her work in exhibitions such as The Bearden Project (2012); Fore (2012); and Regarding the Figure (2017).
Exhibitions and Events