Packard, Emmy Lou, 1914-

Emmy Lou Packard (1914-1998) was a painter and a mural painter.

Painter, mural painter; Calif.; d. Feb. 1998.

Painter, printmaker, muralist; San Francisco, Calif.; b. 1914; d. 1998.

Packard lived in Mexico City in the late 1920s. In 1940-1941, she worked as Diego Rivera's painting assistant on his giant fresco for the World's Fair in San Francisco. Subsequently, she spent a year in Mexico with Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Emmy Lou Packard was born in Imperial Valley, California on April 15, 1914, to Walter and Emma Leonard Packard. In the late 1920s she lived with her family in Mexico City where she became acquainted with Diego Rivera, from whom she received regular art criticism and encouragement. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley and completed courses in fresco and sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts in 1940. That year and the next, Packard worked as a full-time painting assistant to Rivera on his 1,650 square-foot fresco at the World's Fair in San Francisco. During this project, Packard became very close to Rivera and Frida Kahlo and returned to Mexico with them and spent a year living with the couple.

From then on, except for a year spent in 1943 working for a defense plant, Packard worked and grew in various aspects of her art. In addition to her work in fresco, Packard is known for her work in watercolor, oil, mosaic, laminated plastic, concrete and printmaking, both in linocuts and woodblocks. She went to Europe, received numerous commissions that included installations for ships, hotels, and private homes for which she executed large woodcuts and mural panels. During the 1950s and 1960s, Packard was hired to restore several historic murals, most notably the Rincon Annex Post Office mural by Anton Refregier and the Coit Tower murals in San Francisco.

Between 1966 and 1967 commissioned by architects, she designed and executed a number of concrete and mosaic pieces, one of which went to the Mirabeau Restaurant in Kaiser Center, Oakland. She also designed and executed a mural for the Fresno Convention Center Theater in that same period. In 1973-1974, she designed and supervised a glazed brick mural for a public library in Pinole, California.

Packard had one-woman shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Raymond and Raymond Gallery (San Francisco), the Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, Mass.), Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Pushkin Museum (Moscow), and the March Gallery in Chicago. Emmy Lou Packard died in 1998.