Featured Artist Veronica Clements 2021 EVANSTON + VICINITY BIENNIAL

Veronica Clements, Juror's Choice Awards 2021 EVANSTON + VICINITY BIENNIAL one of the Midwest’s largest and most prestigious juried exhibitions, offering artists an opportunity to have their work viewed by three talented curators, Alpha M. Bruton, Dan Devening, and Kate Pollasch.

Veronica Clements grew up on mixtapes, plastic Happy Meal toys, and the purple cheetah print of Lisa Frank stickers. Now as a twenty-four-year-old artist, these themes of playful, gaudy nostalgia run through her paintings like an electric current. Dealing with themes of gender, humor, and modes of transgression, she is interested in ways to confront, subvert, manipulate, and elaborate art practices and spaces. Chicago’s influence is very present in her work. In a recent painting titled “Vanitas Film Still #1,” a girl is seen dancing on the balcony of the Marina Towers. On her Instagram, Clements frequently films time-lapses of herself painting and makes posts where she gives an explanation into aspects of her process and shows her studio. 

Clements is a Chicago native and recent graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus in painting and art history. Clements recently joined the Young Women’s Caucus board, a sub-caucus of the National Women’s Caucus for Art in Chicago, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating opportunities for female visual artists.

When Clements envisions her future, she sees herself working as an independent artist. She says there is something fiercely remarkable and powerful about a colony of young artists, especially women and artists of color, who deeply understand “the value we bring to the art world.”