📢 CATCH UP! Weekly Artist Feature

Jennifer Packer (b. 1984, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American visual artist known for her emotionally resonant paintings that center Black life, interiority, and remembrance. Working primarily in portraiture and still life, she creates atmospheric compositions that hold space for vulnerability, care, and collective memory, exploring how Black life is mourned, honored, and made visible.

Weekly Artist Feature

Portrait of Jennifer Packer

Photographed by Joshua Franzos

Jennifer Packer's work was recently featured in “Jennifer Packer: Dead Letter” at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York (October 18 – December 20, 2025). The exhibition presented a series of paintings that reflect on grief, care, and remembrance, continuing Packer’s exploration of how portraiture and still life can hold space for intimacy and collective memory.

Learn more about the Jennifer Packer: Dead Letter exhibition and explore her work. →

Her work has been featured in major institutional presentations, including solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where her paintings have been recognized for their quiet intensity and emotional depth.

Working through gestural brushwork, saturated color, and atmospheric abstraction, Packer allows figures and floral arrangements to emerge and dissolve within luminous fields of paint. Faces often appear partially obscured or softly rendered, resisting fixed definition while inviting sustained attention. These compositional strategies challenge conventional portraiture, creating space for reflection, tenderness, and ambiguity.

Packer’s art fuses intimacy with historical awareness, transforming portraiture into a site of care and witness. Through painting, she invites viewers to reconsider how Black presence is remembered and sustained, foregrounding dignity, fragility, and the enduring power of love and loss within contemporary life.

, take a closer look at her profile in our Digital Artist Library →

Highlights:

Packer earned a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art.
Awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2017 in recognition of her contributions to contemporary painting.
Major solo exhibitions include presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Serpentine Galleries, London.
Her work is held in significant public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Click the link to learn more about Jennifer Packer and her work through her website. Watch the video below!

Jennifer Packer, figurative artist examining visibility, identity and mourning – Heinz Awardee

Featured Exhibition

Jennifer Packer, “Nate, Chey”, 2025

“Jennifer Packer: Dead Letter” – Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York, NY, USA (October 18 – December 20, 2025)

This solo exhibition by Jennifer Packer reflects on grief, remembrance, and the urgency of being seen. Born from the profound loss of poet April Freely, Dead Letter explores the limits of representation and the impossibility of fully containing love or absence within an image. Drawing from the language of poetry and the lives of Black women as caretakers, witnesses, and matriarchs, Packer’s paintings hold space for vulnerability, precision, and emotional intensity. Through portraiture and gesture, she creates works that resist forgetting and insist on recognition, building what writer Chris Abani describes as a “common body of remembrance.”

Past Exhibitions

“Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing” – Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA (Oct 30, 2021 – April 17, 2022)
“Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing” – Serpentine Galleries , London, United Kingdom (May 19 – August 22, 2021)
“Quality of Life” – Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York, NY, USA (November 29, 2018 – January 19, 2019)