At the Whitney, Jennifer Packer’s Portraits Capture the Messiness of Memory and Trauma

Jennifer Packer’s oil painting Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) (2020) is a mustard-colored peek into a person’s life. This canvas is currently on view at the Whitney Museum’s new exhibition “Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing.” Open through April 2022, the show is the second iteration of the traveling exhibition that debuted at London’s Serpentine Galleries. With over 30 works, it is the largest survey of the artist’s oeuvre thus far.

Measuring roughly 10 by 14 feet—the artist’s largest painting to date—Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) shows a young, nondescript man sleeping on a sofa; his head is tilted back, resting on the arm of the bullet hole–riddled upholstered couch he sleeps on. His environment is immersed in yellows, pinks, and greens, and he is surrounded by everyday objects, including a table fan, an iron, and a small poster with a Batman badge, possibly indicating that children also reside in this home.

“I’m interested in the co-dependency of humans existing in spaces,” the artist states in the exhibition’s text. “I’m interested in the environment as much as the figures that sit within it.”

At first glance, the work merely seems like a tableau, like the artist is peeling back a wall that separates us from the intimate setting of someone’s living room. But this canvas symbolizes so much more than that—the Bronx-based artist made the piece to memorialize Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who was murdered by Louisville police officers on March 13, 2020. Packer paints a novel picture of the infamous narrative by opting to render the figurative elements of the piece with unconstrained marks and drips. Instead of meticulously rendering her likeness, Packer only references Breonna’s story.

Much like Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), many of the other pieces on view at the Whitney touch on similar themes of memory, trauma, and abstraction. The exhibition’s title takes its name from the Bible verse Ecclesiastes 1:8 and “points to the idea of an insatiable desire for knowledge through sensory experience as well as the significance of bearing witness in an exhausting cycle of familiar traumas,” according to the curatorial text. Packer’s pieces perfectly embody this sentiment, from Cumulative Losses (2012–17), which shows a person crouching over a pool table, just about to take a decisive shot, to Say Her Name (2017), a somber scene depicting a bouquet of flowers memorializing Sandra Bland’s untimely death in police custody, three days after her arrest for a minor traffic violation.

“My inclination to paint…is a completely political one,” Packer states in the exhibition’s press release. “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.”

Packer asserts these sentiments through her complex works. The artist’s pieces are rendered from life, giving them a depth that paintings referencing photographs often lack. Her shadows are sumptuous and her surfaces are annotated with globs of paint, bold highlights, and gestural marks. These pieces aren’t mimetic. Instead, they are emphatic, unbridled expressions wrought from loose brushstrokes, fluid drips, and dried droplets.

“People think representation is more believable or real than abstraction,” Packer told curator Hans Ulrich Obrist during an interview with Cultured magazine earlier this year. “But van Gogh’s paintings don’t look real. I’ve never seen a painting that looked real, but I’ve seen paintings that felt real. I’m interested in something that runs through the work despite what the image is.”

One piece on view, The Body Has Memory (2018), illustrates this philosophy. The burgundy-bathed portrait shows the artist’s friend and fellow artist Eric N. Mack sitting down and facing the viewer. Though we know who the painting depicts, it’s difficult for us to make out the subject’s facial features, which are obscured by encrusted layers of oil paint. You can see the “paint holidays”—the tiny gaps in a stroke where the brush’s bristles don’t quite meet one another—and it’s clear that the artist is leaning into the fluid qualities of oils instead of shying away from them, much like her artistic influence Henri Fantin-Latour. These moves towards abstraction give Packer’s paintings vivacity, making them stories about texture, color, and spirit. Looking at The Body Has a Memory, we get the sense that the artist is more interested in capturing Mack’s essence than his exactness.