Congratulations to RHMF Artist Alumni, 2013, for her recent Whitney Museum of American Art survey, The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, which is the largest survey of Packer’s practice to date. Packer’s paintings and drawings combine observation, memory, and improvisation. Her intimate renderings of friends, family, and flowers evoke the art historical genres of portraiture and still life, while also highlighting the politics of representation. “My inclination to paint,” Packer has said, “especially from life, is a completely political one. We belong here. We deserve to be seen and acknowledged in real time. We deserve to be heard and to be imaged with shameless generosity and accuracy.”
Titles of the works in the slide show in order are,
The Body Has Memory
The Mind Is Its Own Place
For James (III)
Say Her Name
The painting Say her Name was made nearly two years after Sandra Bland’s death while in police custody, Packer made this painting in her memory.
Sandra Bland was twenty-eight years old when she died in police custody, three days after her arrest following a minor traffic violation in Prairie View, Texas, in July 2015. Local officials deemed Bland’s death a suicide and refused her family’s request for an independent autopsy. Protests arose, charging that the circumstances of Bland’s death had been obscured, and that both her aggressive arrest and her extended jail time were excessive. Police violence against Black women became a new point of focus, as did the tendency of these incidents to to be ignored by the media and excluded from racial justice campaigns.
Rema Hort Mann Foundation celebrates Jennifer Packer and her incredible work as we continue to highlight the Artist Alumni from our 25+ years of grant giving to outstanding artists.
