Visual Arts Fellow Jennifer Packer Wins 2025 Heinz Award
Photo by Joshua Franzos
“Storytelling is at the center of how we understand ourselves and everything else. Most stories, regardless of their significance, are held solely in the body or in language, and they disappear when that body is lost. I care very deeply about many things and am certain that few will try to contain them in the way I know they deserve to be held.
There is a naturally powerful and confusing tension between the pain of grieving remembrance and the radiance of perseverant, living things. How lucky are we to survive? I hope it is clear that the work is fought for, not out of some fixation with making beautiful objects or mindlessly carrying a torch for the tradition of painting, but as a true existential and evidential practice.”
— Jennifer Packer
For 30 years, the Heinz Family Foundation has honored bold, curious and passionate risk takers and changemakers. This year, we are honored to celebrate Visual Arts Fellow Jennifer Packer (2014-2015, 2015-2016) who has received the Heinz Award for the Arts. Packer is joined by an extraordinary group of visionaries who are reflecting on our shared histories while charting new paths toward a brighter, more hopeful future. This years recipients include Jennifer Packer and Marie Watt, for recognition in the arts, Bryon Auguste and Sara Bronin for their innovation in the economy, and Dana Gunders and Sacoby Wilson for their contributions toward bettering the environment.
Jennifer Packer is a celebrated figurative artist whose fluid paintings and drawings merge expressive linework, luminous color and passages of dissolution to powerful effect. Working primarily in portraiture and still life, she portrays her subjects — often friends and family — with tenderness and depth. These figures appear to emerge from or recede into the picture plane, a deliberate act of providing her sitters with privacy and autonomy. The emotional and psychological complexity of her work unfolds gradually, inviting sustained contemplation.
Deeply informed by art and social history, Ms. Packer explores the politics of visibility, identity and mourning. This stems from her early days of grappling with public fixation on representation of American identity and her desire to capture something knowable of the humans willing to sit in front of her. Her paintings possess a formal discipline refined through years of practice, yet remain open, intimate and alive with improvisation. Her still life botanical works, partially influenced by watching the events that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, often serve as objects of remembrance, their lush beauty shadowed by grief. One such work, “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!),” honors Breonna Taylor, who was shot by police in her home. Rather than painting Ms. Taylor directly, Ms. Packer integrates images from the relentless media coverage of the event, painting an interior populated with familiar, everyday objects.
Across her body of work, Ms. Packer constructs a language of softness and strength, weaving the personal with the political. Her paintings do not offer simple narratives; instead, they hold space for complexity, for quiet reflection and for the dignity of life.
Ms. Packer’s work has been exhibited at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, London’s Serpentine Galleries, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
