Jennifer Packer USA, b. 1985

Jennifer Packer was born in 1984 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in southern New Jersey. She earned her B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, in 2007, and her M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, in 2012. From 2012 to 2013, she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and from 2014 to 2016 she held a Visual Arts Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She has been a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, where her research focused on the social, political, and psychological implications of landscape and architecture on African diasporic communities. She currently serves as Assistant Professor in the School of Art at the Cooper Union, New York.

Packer's paintings are built from sustained, direct encounters with her subjects. She asks sitters, typically friends, family members, and fellow artists, to pose for extended periods, a process that generates an intimacy that registers in the work without resolving into conventional likeness. Her portraits do not perform for the viewer: the figures exist on their own terms, absorbed, resting, or simply present. Alongside the portraits, Packer paints funerary flower arrangements and interior scenes that carry an equal weight of attention and grief. Across all of these subjects, her visual language insists on personhood as something to be defended and memorialized, engaging directly with the politics of visibility and representation in relation to Black American experience.

Jennifer Packer's work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Tate, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham; the Smith College Museum of Art; and the Jimenez-Colon Collection, among others. Among the awards and fellowships she has received: the 2025 Heinz Award for the Arts (Heinz Family Foundation, Pittsburgh); the Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome; the John Koch Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2021); the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2013); the Visual Arts Fellowship, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown (2014); and the Hermitage Greenfield Prize.

Packer's exhibition history spans major institutions across the United States and Europe. Solo exhibitions include Tenderheaded at the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2017), which traveled to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham (2018); The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2020), the largest survey of her work to date, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2021-22); Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021-22), her first exhibition on the West Coast; and Dead Letter at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York (2025). Group exhibitions have included Fore at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2012); the Whitney Biennial (2019); Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art (2019, traveling); Prospect 5, New Orleans (2021); and Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024-25), among many others.

Jennifer Packer's relationship with KORNFELD Galerie Berlin reaches back to the early years of 68projects by KORNFELD, the gallery's project space at Fasanenstrasse 68 in Berlin. She was included in Roster Crow (September 6 to November 8, 2014), a focused group exhibition that placed her work alongside two other painters in a presentation designed to introduce emerging American painting to European audiences. She also participated in You Don't Bring Me Flowers (January 24 to April 11, 2015) at 68projects. In 2024, Packer was among the twenty-one artists brought together for Berlin on My Mind: Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD, a milestone exhibition marking a decade of the gallery's residency program.

Jennifer Packer's practice continues to deepen its engagement with mourning, intimacy, and the politics of representation, with each new body of work extending her inquiry into what it means to paint a life with integrity.