Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation, intervention, print
Website: packardjennings.com
Packard Jennings was born in 1970 and is a native of Oakland, California, where he continues to live and work. He received his BA from San Francisco State University in 1996 and his MFA in Sculpture from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2000. His work has been reviewed on the front page of the New York Times, and in Artforum, Flash Art, the Believer, New American Painting, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Playboy. He has collaborated with the Yes Men, Steve Lambert, and Helena Keefe, and has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Cité des Arts in Paris, Djerassi, Kala Institute, Montalvo Arts Center, and Recology San Francisco. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis and the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa.
Jennings works across sculpture, installation, printmaking, animation, video, and interventionist tactics, using the visual language of corporate advertising and consumer product design to expose and satirize political and economic power. His practice is rooted in the belief that art should operate in public and semi-public space — not just galleries — and that distributing tools for dissent is itself an artistic act. His website Destructables.org functions as an ad-free, open-source DIY platform for projects of protest and creative dissent, offering downloadable pamphlets, instructions, and templates for public use.
A recurring strategy is "shopdropping": the covert placement of hand-crafted, politically charged objects into big-box retail stores for unsuspecting customers to encounter. Jennings was among the earliest practitioners of this form, beginning in 1998. His Anarchist Action Figure (2007) — a meticulously crafted boxed toy placed in Target stores in the weeks before Christmas — became one of the most widely circulated works of its kind, covered on the front page of the New York Times. His longer-running project Police Mindfulness Meditation (2012–ongoing), developed after he was beaten by riot police during Occupy Oakland, proposes mindfulness meditation as an intervention into police violence — a deadpan, uncomfortable proposition that refuses both cynicism and naivety about institutional reform.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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