I am appalled [now] that women permit the passing of restrictive laws with obscene stipulations that rule their bodies. Many states forbid abortions and birth-control. Abortion clinics are fewer and fewer and remain in danger of violent attacks. Will women again be forced to have illegal abortions in filthy back rooms without anesthesia, as I did when I was nineteen? Why don’t women rise up against this? Vera Klement

In my new job teaching art at the University [of Chicago], I wore jeans and gym shoes, and I rejoiced in being able to move about with the freedom of a man. I threw away the contrivances of torture—metal, bone and rubber, the curlers that pressed against my scalp at night, threw out the items that spelled sexy woman in magazines—items that knead and mold us into forms meant to be more feminine, but that were actually there to limit our movement, our freedom. Out they went. Exhilaration! There was a profound shift in psychological and philosophical thinking—a revolution of the mind that questioned the age-old social hierarchies, the ancient patriarchal authority. A shift that questioned, finally, what it meant to be human. Vera Klement

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

I painted in silence and isolation for the first seven years in Chicago’s Hyde Park. Although painful, there was a certain benefit to be derived from rejection. As the Chicago art world ignored me and labeled me a New York Painter—with its subtext Jewish, I was forced to question the premise of my work. Were my ideas limited to geography, to a particular city? What kind of a painter was I? I had to define my work and my aims to myself with greater precision. My work matured. Vera Klement

Again, I was an immigrant, a misplaced artist [in Chicago], one who dealt with the contemplative, the sublime, whose work had developed out of the existential gesturalism of the fifties in New York and the traditions of European Modernism, tinged perhaps more than I was aware of with the melancholy of my early days as a Jewish war refugee. I found no audience in Chicago. The Jewish collectors avoided my work and its underlying content. Vera Klement

In my teaching I would frequently use this description of making perfume as a metaphor for reductive painting—as in the work of Mark Rothko, for example. Rothko’s paintings, I would tell the students, embrace the space and spirit of the world, its vastness and its tragedy. He would reduce and compress that immensity, essentialize it, the essence of life until that magnitude was reduced to two trembling rectangles—the Sublime. Vera Klement