Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing

Nearly two years after Sandra Bland’s death while in police custody, Packer made this painting in her memory. Grappling with profound grief and not wanting to make a spectacle of the circumstances of Bland’s death, Packer chose to paint a still life to express her inability to reconcile herself to the visceral loss of someone that she did not know personally. Of her floral paintings, Packer has stated: “the bouquets like Say Her Name highlight something that’s been true in my practice overall, which is this appreciation for [painting from] observation and also understanding the emotional resonance of things—the spaces in which we exist that surround the people that we care about, whether we know them or not.”

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 be ignored by the media and excluded from racial justice campaigns.