Packard, Emmy Lou

PACKARD, EMMY LOU (1914-1998). Born in 1914 in California’s Imperial Valley to progressive activists, to an agronomist father active in educational reform and leftwing movements and a mother active in women’s movements, Packard acquired a vision of art and politics that lasted throughout her life. During her teen years, she spent extensive time in Mexico, where her parents’ friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo influenced her greatly. She later married Burton Cairns, an architect, and together they had a son, Donald Cairns. She studied art formally at the University of California-Berkeley and graduated in 1936. At the San Francisco Art Institute she studied mural painting, later to play a major role in her legacy as a community-based artist in the Bay Area.

Following her husband’s death in 1939, she returned to Mexico and renewed her friendship with Rivera and Kahlo. Both Rivera and Kahlo had close (if turbulent) associations with the Mexican Communist Party, and Packard herself joined the American Communist Party in the early 1940s. Her subsequent travels widened her vision by enabling her to see other cultures, especially ordinary women and men engaged in the daily activities of life and labor.

This background helped shape Packard’s visual work, allowing her to add significantly to the long traditions of radical art. But if she played a prominent part in the community of progressive artists, she lacked the major critical recognition of many of her male peers, particularly those who came to prominence during the triumph of abstract expressionism in the post-World War II era.

Packard’s artwork was mostly not overtly political. Instead, she depicted workers in remarkably sensitive ways, including prints, drawings, and paintings of fishermen, net menders, fruit and berry pickers, ship workers, and others. By focusing on ordinary people at their jobs, she imbued them with the dignity they seldom received in their actual lives. That artistic strategy served as a model for subsequent generations of socially-conscious artists. The less known part of her work aimed at specific political causes, including worker rights, peace, multiculturalism and anti-war views and actions. Her posters for peace and children and against war, racism, and sexism, widely seen in their era, have become part of an enduring artistic-political tradition. She also took part in struggles for women’s rights and especially for women in the arts.

DePaoli, Geri. Emmy Lou Packard. Davis, California: John Natsoulas Press, 1998.

Pfeiffer, Pat, “Emmy Lou Packard’s Palette of Paints and Prints,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, May 2, 1982.

Emmy Lou Packard Papers, 1914-1998. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/emmy-lou-packard-papers-5519