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Vera Klement (1929 - 2023) was born in what is now Gdansk, Poland. On the edge of the Baltic Sea, this small town was celebrated for its natural beauty. Klement wrote that growing up there, the duality between the bright lights of the sea and the darkness of the silent forest beyond, inspired a sense of light and dark in her work. Klement fled her hometown in Europe to escape the Nazis after Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) and arrived in New York in 1938. After six decades as a painter, Klement continues to reference the Baltic Lands she left behind and reconciles that loss with her newfound identity as an American, a Feminist, and an immigrant. Her paintings draw upon music, literature, and her own memories to create the poetic images she is best known for.
Klement graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture in 1950 and went on to become professor emerita at the University of Chicago from 1969 until 1995. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows across the United States as well as in Germany, and her collections span from New York to Illinois to Jerusalem, Israel. Klement is recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, three Illinois Arts Council Grants, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Camargo Foundation Residency and Stipend to study in France, and a MacDowell fellowship. |
