Honoring Artists Who Shape Our Stories

The Heinz Awards for the Arts, now in its 30th year, has named Jennifer Packer and Marie Watt as its 2025 recipients. Each artist receives an unrestricted $250,000 prize, recognition not only of their singular practices but of the way their work reshapes how we understand memory, identity, and cultural inheritance.

Administered by the Pittsburgh-based Heinz Family Foundation, the awards honor visionaries in the arts, the economy, and the environment. Packer and Watt join a distinguished roster of past laureates, but their pairing is especially resonant: both artists speak to the endurance of stories, carried not only through words but through bodies, communities, and materials.

Jennifer Packer: Painting as Witness

Based in New York, Jennifer Packer has emerged as one of the most vital voices in contemporary painting. Her jewel-toned portraits—at once intimate and disquieted—hover between figuration and abstraction, suggesting inner lives too complex to be neatly captured.

Her landmark 2021 solo show at the Whitney Museum placed Black figures at the forefront, depicted with a quiet dignity that resists both stereotype and spectacle.

Storytelling is at the center of how we understand ourselves and everything else.

– Packer has said.

Her paintings embody that belief, becoming vessels for memory, grief, and care. They are not simply portraits; they are elegies and affirmations.

Marie Watt: Blankets as Living Archives

Where Packer turns to paint, Marie Watt turns to fiber, steel, and community. A citizen of the Seneca Nation, Watt creates monumental sculptures and textile works that foreground Indigenous knowledge and feminist Haudenosaunee traditions.

Her acclaimed “Blanket Stories” series transforms donated blankets into towering columns, each layered with the weight of histories, from family heirlooms to everyday comforters.

I see blankets as living, storied objects.

– Watt notes, recalling how they accompany us from birth through death.

The stains, worn edges, and mended seams become archives of lived experience, carrying both individual and collective memory.

In Watt’s hands, the textile is never passive. It is a witness, a caretaker, and a cultural record that challenges Western hierarchies of art by insisting that beauty, heritage, and resilience reside in the most ordinary of materials.

That the Heinz Foundation chose these two artists feels especially timely. Packer and Watt create work that does not retreat into aesthetics alone but confronts how histories are erased, remembered, and carried forward. Their practices remind us that art’s role is not simply to adorn walls but to hold the weight of stories that might otherwise be lost.

Amid an art world often obsessed with spectacle and market records, the Heinz Awards gesture toward another value system—one where storytelling, community, and continuity are seen as profound achievements in themselves.