Emmy Lou Packard "Strawberry Pickers Near Pajaro", Linocut in Colors, 1950

Packard studied with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Mexico City in 1927-1928, marking the beginning of a long friendship and mentorship. She was Rivera's chief assistant on the Pan American Unity mural for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1940 (and was painted into the mural wearing a red sweater). Although not as politically charged as Rivera's art, she too believed in activism through art by grappling themes of social inequality and justice.

Emmy Lou Packard was born in California in 1914. Her father, Walter Packard, was an internationally known agronomist. In 1927, taking his family with him, he went to Mexico City as a consultant on the government's historic land reform program.

There, Ms. Packard, who drew and painted precociously at the age of 13, was taken by her mother to meet muralist Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Rivera later recalled the beauty of the little girl "with the face of a French Gothic angel plucked from the reliefs of Chartres.'' When he came to San Francisco to do a fresco for the Treasure Island World's Fair in 1940 (now at City College of San Francisco), she was his full-time assistant and painted side by side with him on many areas of the 1,650-square-foot mural.

By then, Ms. Packard was a full- fledged artist who had studied from 1932 to 1936 at UC Berkeley, where she was art editor of the Daily Californian, the student newspaper, and of Occident, the campus literary magazine. She was also the first female editor of the Pelican, the humor magazine.