Introduction

Rujeko Hockley: This is a show that shares over thirty works by Jennifer Packer, a New York–based artist born in 1984, and one of the preeminent painters of her generation.

Narrator: Rujeko Hockley is one of the curators of this exhibition.

Rujeko Hockley: She works primarily in portraiture and still life, which are genres of painting that go back to the earliest days of Western painting. So her use of them connects her to a very deep history, but also places her in a very contemporary context, thinking about current events, her peers, her friends, and the personal relationships that she has.

Jane Panetta: I think a lot about the way she uses portraiture to do something political.

Narrator: Jane Panetta co-curated this exhibition.

Jane Panetta: So while the predominance of paintings in the show are portraits or still lifes, so many of them are really using the work, and this type of work, not in a didactic way, but in a way that raises issues around Black invisibility, violence against Black life, that these are really recurring motifs, but consistently she’s using the portrait, the still life, in part as a mechanism to convey these ideas.

Narrator: We conducted some of these interviews over Zoom, so sound quality may vary.