China has always fascinated Veronica Hernandez. She’d learned about the country in high school and was on the verge of being fluent in Chinese, so when she heard that NYU was opening a campus in Shanghai, she knew it was where she was meant to be. However, what the global China studies major didn’t know was that being at NYU Shanghai would change her life’s trajectory dramatically and take her on a four-continent journey to pursue her true calling: a career in the arts.
How did you come to choose art as your focus?
I used my spare time between classes in Shanghai to explore the city’s growing contemporary art scene and museums like the Yuz and the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal. I’d leave the gallery and obsessively start learning all I could about the artists. I fell in love with Shanghai’s art, and I knew I’d found my “thing.” I landed an internship at the Pantocrator Gallery, where I assisted international artists who had come to Shanghai for a residency program. Professor Tarocco helped me get an internship with the West Bund Art and Design Fair.
So art gave you direction. What happened next?
I added an art history minor to my global China studies major and planned a full year abroad. I started it off with the summer of a lifetime in New York City. I took courses at NYU, and I worked as a PR and social media intern at the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, a nonprofit artist-run space for women. I soaked up the legendary New York art scene, and I especially loved the new Whitney Museum, which definitely lived up to all the hype I’d read about it. That summer is on my college highlight reel, for sure, but as it ended, I was off to NYU Buenos Aires for fall and then to NYU Florence for spring. I actually really missed Shanghai!
Then you were away from NYU Shanghai for your whole junior year?
Yes. It was bittersweet, actually, because I’d grown attached to the place. But how could I pass up studying art in South America and Europe? During my fall semester in Buenos Aires, I took a course on street art and politics while I interned at a marketing agency that works with local street artists. In the spring I went to NYU Florence to study art history and toured museums with world-famous works by Donatello and Michelangelo. I visited friends at NYU London and NYU Berlin, and my semester in Florence turned into a whirlwind course in European art. I cannot even process how much art I saw and how much I’ve learned. I know I’m going to look back on these four years with a hint of disbelief and ask myself, “Did I really do all of that?”