Keith Timmons Lecture Series
Organized by Clifford Owens, Director of Critical Studies, New York Academy of Art
This lecture series is supported by Keith Timmons, a Baltimore-based art collector, to convene Black artists, scholars, curators, and critics at the New York Academy of Art during the 2025 – 2026 academic year.
image credit: Courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins gallery
Jennifer Packer creates portraits, interior scenes, and still lifes that suggest a casual intimacy. Packer views her works as the result of an authentic encounter and exchange. The models for her portraits—commonly friends or family members—are relaxed and seemingly unaware of the artist’s or viewer’s gaze.
Packer’s paintings are rendered in loose line and brush stroke using a limited color palette, often to the extent that her subject merges with or retreats into the background. Suggesting an emotional and psychological depth, her work is enigmatic, avoiding a straightforward reading. “I think about images that resist, that attempt to retain their secrets or maintain their composure, that put you to work,” she explains. “I hope to make works that suggest how dynamic and complex our lives and relationships really are.”
Born in 1984 in Philadelphia, Jennifer Packer received her BFA from the Tyler University School of Art at Temple University in 2007, and her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012. Packer has been recognized with a 2025 Heinz Award for the Arts. She was the 2012-2013 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, from 2014-2016.
Her work was most recently featured in two major solo exhibitions: Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, the largest survey of Packer’s work to date, presented at Serpentine Galleries, London (2020) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2021-22), and Jennifer Packer: Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2021-22), her first exhibition on the west coast. Her first solo institutional exhibition, Tenderheaded, was presented at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2017) and the Rose Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2018). Her work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and P.5 – Prospect New Orleans (2021). Packer currently lives and works in New York.
artwork images: Courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins gallery
image credit: Emmie America
Clifford Owens is an interdisciplinary artist. He makes photographs, performance art, drawings, videos, and texts. His art has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Owens’s solo museum exhibitions include Anthology at MoMA PS1, Better the Rebel You Know at the former Cornerhouse in Manchester, England, and Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His group exhibitions include Freestyle, Greater New York 2005, and Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century. Owens’s performance-based projects have been widely presented in museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Owens has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous other fellowships and awards.