I looked out at the room [for a talk] full of strangers with anxiety. Then I thought of my consciousness-raising group, and suddenly I saw a room-full of warm and interested women, women who had come out on a dark night to hear me—to hear what I had to say. And I reached out to them, addressing each woman individually. I revealed myself to them, and for the first time in my life I was able to say what I thought, what I felt, without fear of judgment, in total control. I held the eye of one, then another as I spoke, sharing very personal things about my own work and life with these women who were eager to know me. Vera Klement

Once the new Feminist ideas were released, there was no stuffing them back into their narrow boxes. My career in Chicago was finally launched. In 1974, ten years after coming to Chicago, I had my first solo show of paintings at the Artemisia Gallery. Vera Klement

In 1972, at the height of the feminist upsurge, a call went out to women artists in the Chicago area to discuss the formation of a non-hierarchical cooperative feminist gallery. I went. The meeting room was packed with women. The group voted for four of the women present to be a committee that was to select thirty women for membership in the new gallery. I was one of the thirty. We named our gallery Artemisia, after the glorious Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Vera Klement

We talked [in the consciousness-raising group] about the difficulties with our husbands and lovers—their betrayals. We examined a woman’s life, sex and self, feeling and mind, ego and world, freedom and tradition, creativity and enslavement. And slowly, slowly, the painful loneliness that my marriage had built around my life like a smooth cold wall began to hold the possibility of a door to a place where there were others who cared, who understood, who had perhaps suffered similarly. I felt less alone, less abandoned. Vera Klement

It [consciousness-raising] was a profound shakeup. I learned that much of what I’d suffered throughout my life, what I had thought was uniquely mine, was actually experienced by many women, I’d always hated my body with its crooked spine, hated my lack of pigment. But in this sheltered room in East Hampton [New York], among women whose perfect figures I had envied, I learned to my surprise that they had suffered the same disappointments—hating their too small, too large, unequal or droopy breasts, the stretch marks of childbirth on their bellies, their flat asses or spongy thighs. Vera Klement