Artist Jennifer Packer, Whose Paintings are ‘Infused With Grief and Beauty,’ Will Receive 2025 Heinz Award, Including $250,000 Prize

Jennifer Packer. | Photo by Joshua Franzos, Courtesy Heinz Family Foundation

TIME IS REQUIRED to truly see and consider the paintings and drawings of Jennifer Packer (b. 1984). The artist makes portraits, floral still lifes, and interior scenes grounded in art history and engaged with the politics of culture and identity, visibility and mourning. The loosely rendered works often employ fine-line details and intense color with a limited palette. Packer’s family, friends, and fellow artists usually sit for her portraits; the botanicals are about loss and remembrance; and her environmental compositions of figures in spaces contain vital narrative information. Rich with storytelling, the pictures possess a depth of emotion. Hard to decipher, they fuel and challenge the viewer’s imagination.

The Heinz Family Foundation annually recognizes extraordinary achievements in the arts, economy, and environment with unrestricted cash prizes of $250,000. Packer is one of six individuals being honored this year. She is receiving the 2025 Heinz Award for the Arts.

“My husband, John Heinz, viewed the arts as a medium through which a society examines its conscience and searches for its identity,” Heinz Family Foundation Chair Teresa Heinz said in a statement. “Jennifer’s work is at once infused with beauty and grief. Her paintings bear witness to our unfolding history, compelling us to move beyond mere reflection to a place of changed understanding and respectful connection to her subjects and their stories.”

Over the past dozen years, Packer has developed a critically recognized practice and garnered attention from major institutions. Born in Philadelphia, Pa., New York-based Packer earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art (2012) and participated in the artist-in-residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2012-13). She was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and Prospect 5, the New Orleans triennial in 2021. A few years ago, “Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing,” the largest-ever exhibition of the artist, was on view at Serpentine Galleries in London (2020) and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2021-22).

Next month, Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York is presenting “Jennifer Packer: Dead Letter” (Oct. 18-Dec. 13, 2025), the artist’s third solo show with the gallery and the latest to showcase the complexity of her vision.

“Storytelling is at the center of how we understand ourselves and everything else,” Packer said in a statement. “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.”

“Jennifer’s work is at once infused with beauty and grief. Her paintings bear witness to our unfolding history, compelling us to move beyond mere reflection to a place of changed understanding and respectful connection to her subjects and their stories.”
— Heinz Family Foundation Chair Teresa Heinz

THE 2025 HEINZ AWARD FOR THE ARTS also went to interdisciplinary artist Marie Watt. Based in Portland, Ore., Watt is a citizen of the Seneca Nation (part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy), who also descends from German-Scot ancestry. The award announcement said she works across printmaking, textiles, and sculpture “to explore cultural intersections and the rich tapestry of shared human stories.”

Watt and Packer are joining an impressive group of previous recipients of the Heinz Award, including artists Jennie C. Jones, Roberto Lugo, Kevin Beasley, Sanford Biggers, vanessa german, Rick Lowe, and Cauleen Smith. In 1994, filmmaker Henry Hampton (1940-1988) was the sole recipient of the first Heinz Award. Hampton, created and executive produced the landmark documentary series “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement.”

In October, the Heinz Family Foundation will honor this year’s recipients of the 30th Heinz Awards in Pittsburgh, Pa.

“There is a naturally powerful and confusing tension between the pain of grieving remembrance and the radiance of perseverant, living things,” Packer said in a statement. “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.” CT

SEE FULL LIST of 2025 Heinz Award recipients

JENNIFER PACKER, “A Lesson in Longing” 2019 (oil on canvas, 108 x 144 inches / 274.3 x 365.8 cm). | © Jennifer Packer, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York; Corvi-Mora, Londo

JENNIFER PACKER, “Tomashi,” 2016 (oil on canvas, 13.75 x 10.75 inches / 34.9 x 27.3 cm). | © Jennifer Packer, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York; Corvi-Mora, Londo

JENNIFER PACKER, Say Her Name , 2017 (oil on canvas, 48 x 40 inches / 121.9 x 101.6 cm). | © Jennifer Packer, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York; Corvi-Mora, Londo

JENNIFER PACKER, Untitled, 2020 (charcoal and pastel on colored paper. 9 x 9.75 inches / 22.9 x 24.8 cm). | © Jennifer Packer, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York; Corvi-Mora, Londo

JENNIFER PACKER, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), 2020 (oil on canvas, 118 x 172 1/2 inches / 299.7 x 438.2 cm). | © Jennifer Packer, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York; Corvi-Mora, Londo

BOOKSHELF
“Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied with Seeing” was published to accompany the Jennifer Packer’s 2021 exhibition at Serpentine Gallery’s, her first show outside the United States. The artist and curators also compiled a reading list of titles that have influence Packer’s work and explore the themes of the exhibition. “Jennifer Packer: Tenderheaded,” the first publication to document her paintings, was published in 2018 on the occasion of her first solo institutional exhibition, which was organized by the Renaissance Society in Chicago. Now hard to find, the volume includes a conversation between Packer and Kerry James Marshall.