Jennifer Packer’s Unique Employment of Color: How the Artist Uses Hue to Mystify and Politicize Simultaneously

Jennifer Packer has immensely impacted the art world since her emergence a decade ago. An African American woman, Packer uses her art to depict, analyze, and complicate the intricacies of living in the United States as a Black person. Packer’s singular style of intimate portraits bordering on the abstract makes her work both intellectually and visually engaging. This essay argues that Packer uses color, through various techniques, to address the socio-political dilemmas she wants to get at in her work. At the same time, she uses these hues in abstraction to lift her paintings away from reality