Jennifer Packer: Tenderheaded

Packer's first monograph is the book that introduced her painting to a wider readership: portraits and funerary bouquets held in thin, searching washes of colour, made at a moment when the question of how Black bodies are seen and mourned had become unavoidable.

Published by the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 2018, the hardcover documents "Tenderheaded," Packer's autumn 2017 exhibition there. Alongside full documentation of the paintings and works on paper it carries a conversation between Packer and Kerry James Marshall, essays by Jessica Bell Brown and April Freely, a poem by Safiya Sinclair, and an introduction by the curator Solveig Ovstebo. The design is by Hyo Kwon. The volume argues for Packer's rigorous engagement with the history of painting as inseparable from her highly personal response to the present political landscape.

Packer (b. 1984, Philadelphia) studied at Tyler School of Art and Yale, and has since had solo presentations at the Serpentine in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her flower paintings, made as elegies for people killed by police violence, are among the works this book first published.