Dawn Clements (1958-2018) produced ink and watercolor works on paper in response to the physical and temporal environment in and surrounding Eastman Studio over the course of two residences at MacDowell. Her intricate drawings and watercolors captured detailed scenes from her own life and from movie melodramas, often on a panoramic scale. She drew — generally in sumi ink or ballpoint pen — and painted often using multiple sheets of crinkled paper, stitched together into large, irregular shapes that contrasted with the technical precision of her hand.
Clements grew up in Chelmsford, Mass., and received a bachelor’s degree at Brown University in 1986 and a master’s of fine arts degree at the University at Albany in 1989. By 1993 she was represented in the Venice Biennale. Later in the 1990s she was in group exhibitions at Skidmore College, the University Art Museum in Albany, and numerous other places. Since the turn of the century, her work has been seen in scores of group shows, including at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, ME, as well as in China, Belgium, England, and elsewhere.
Selected exhibitions included solo shows at Pierogi Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); Acme Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Hales Gallery (London, England); John Davis Gallery (Hudson, NY) and the Middlebury College Museum of Art (Middlebury, VT). Her work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum of American Art); in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, Austria); Saatchi Gallery (London, England) and other galleries and museums. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; two MacDowell Fellowships; Yaddo Fellowship; Civitella Ranieri Fellowship; New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in the category of Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books; and other grants and residencies. Her artwork is included in collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY, NY); Whitney Museum of American Art (MY, NY); Saatchi Gallery (London); Brown University (Providence, RI); Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY), Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, NJ); Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA) and other public and private collections.
