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Femininity is Invaluable & Nina Klein’s Art is Here To Prove It

Salomé Gómez-Upegui
3 min readFeb 8, 2019

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Images courtesy of Nina Klein

Nina Klein is a California-based artist whose dreamlike paintings are shifting beliefs about the worth of femininity.

For as long as she remembers, Nina has been painting and drawing. As a child, her grandmother and mother would cheer her on and always highlight the talent she was born with. The cheering was ever-present in school as well. “Teachers would tell me I was gifted, I would have my art displayed, and that persuaded me to keep going and to pursue this life,” she told me.

Being one of seven siblings, Nina never felt pressure to be something other than herself. “At home, I was truly given the freedom to do what I wanted, my parents constantly said ‘do what you love, be happy, and the money will come,’ so that faith-based mentality gave me the self-confidence to follow my dreams.”

High school was perhaps the only time Nina wondered about her chance of making it in a male-dominated industry. “Female role models are scarce, the majority of artists you hear about in history books or even in galleries and museums are males,” she mentioned. So for a while, that absence of someone to look up to led her to think perhaps art wasn’t for her. Luckily, in her late teens, the encouragement she’d always received kicked in: “I thought, ‘you know what, I’m talented, I can do this. I love it…

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Salomé Gómez-Upegui
Salomé Gómez-Upegui

Written by Salomé Gómez-Upegui

Colombian-American Writer. Fluent in Spanglish.

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