Jennifer Packer – Whitney
We Are Amazed And In Awe
The most extensive collection of Jennifer Packer’s work is currently on view at the Whitney. The New York museum features over thirty of her paintings and drawings in the exhibition: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing. It comes from Serpentine in London and is on view until April 17, 2022.
Not only is this the artist’s largest show to date, but it is also her first major museum exhibition in New York. Combining observation, memory, and improvisation, Jennifer Packer creates works about the emotional experience of Black people and their environments.
Jennifer Packer was born in Philadelphia in 1984 and currently lives and works in New York City. She received the 2020 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize, and is now an Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design’s painting department. Packer studied at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, where she received a BFA in 2007. At the Yale School of Art, she received an MFA in 2012. About her work, she has stated: “My inclination to paint, 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.”
The show features pieces created between 2011 and 2021. They are new paintings and rarely exhibited drawings, among other works that have been a part of the museum’s collection for some time. It includes The Body Has Memory (2018) and A Lesson in Longing (2019). Apart from her figurative work, visitors will also have the opportunity to view some of her floral compositions. She describes many of these works as “funerary bouquets” and “vessels of personal grief.” Say Her Name (2017), for example, is a response to the death of Sandra Bland in 2015.
The curators of this show first presented her work during the 2019 Whitney Biennial. “Over the past several years, the Whitney has presented significant shows dedicated to a range of contemporary painters, including Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens, and Salman Toor, and we are honored to add Jennifer Packer to this unfolding story,” said Senior Deputy Director and Chief Curator Scott Rothkopf. “Her recent canvases were standouts in the 2019 Biennial, while this exhibition will provide an opportunity to survey the breadth of her extraordinary, still evolving body of work.” “We are thrilled to be bringing Packer’s work to a broader institutional audience, especially in such depth,” Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley have added. “Her ability to formally reimagine the possibilities of painting, combined with her unique engagement with a personal narrative fused with one around the acute vulnerability of Black life, make Packer a singular voice in contemporary painting.”
Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing is organized by Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator, and Jane Panetta, Curator, and Director of the Collection. It is on view in the Museum’s eighth-floor Hurst Family Galleries from October 30, 2021, to Spring 2022. Don’t miss it!
