June Leaf

Last updated
June Leaf
Born1929 (age 93–94)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
EducationInstitute of Design
Years active1949–present
Known forAbstract painting and drawing, kinetic sculpture
Spouse Robert Frank

June Leaf (born 1929) [1] is an American artist known for her abstract allegorical paintings and drawings; she also works in modernist kinetic sculpture. She is based in New York City, on Bleecker Street, and Mabou, Nova Scotia.

Contents

Biography

June Leaf was born in 1929 in Chicago, Illinois. [1] She studied for three months between 1947 and 1948 at the Institute of Design (formerly known as the New Bauhaus), [2] taking classes with artist Hugo Weber. [2] [3] She left school and traveled to Paris in 1948, focusing on creating and identifying abstraction and patterns in her work. [2]

In 1954, she returned to the school for her B.A. degree in Art Education from Roosevelt University and the same year her M.A. degree in Art Education at Institute of Design. [4]

Leaf returned to Paris in 1958–1959 with a Fulbright Grant for painting. [4] When she returned, she moved to New York City in 1960. [2]

She married filmmaker and photographer, Robert Frank in 1971. [5] [6]

In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art held the retrospective exhibition "June Leaf: Thought Is Infinite." In the same year, another retrospective was held at the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York, entitled "June Leaf: A Survey, 1949-Present". [3] [5]

Her work is included in many permanent art collections including, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, [1] the Art Institute of Chicago, [7] Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, [8] Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), [9] Minneapolis Institute of Art. [10]

Works

Coney Island (1968)

Created with pen and ink and colored pencil on paper, 4 × 16 7/8 in. (35.6 × 42.9 cm). June Leaf's 1968 drawing Coney Island is one of her most straightforward images, devoid of the surreal, visionary creatures and places that occupy her creative mind and guide her work. Yet its depiction of a middle-aged couple gazing at an amusement park carousel succinctly encapsulates what her art does: if we envision these protagonists stepping onto the ride, they become an apt metaphor for Leaf's viewers, who similarly must venture into a deeply imagined realm, grounded in real human experience, in which the artist deploys the fantastic to explore the folly of our existence and the possibilities of consciousness. [11]

The Girl with the Hoop (1980)

Created with acrylic and fiber-tipped pen on paper, 8 1/2 × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm). A relatively simple graphite and ink drawing from 2013 of the artist “threading” her eyes with her fingers finds Leaf literally drawing a line out of her brain/vision. The sheet revisits a motif developed in Threading the Story through the Eye of a Needle from 1974, in which a hand encapsulates an imagined scene seemingly pulled forth—threaded through—the eye of its creator. The hand joins the head explicitly in these images. Leaf's representations and interpretations of thought as “infinite” seem to be her meditations on imagination's expression in the physical world through the artist's corporeality: ruminations on the creative process. The subject of how the mind's contents become manifest through the artist's hand is addressed further in a series of works representing substances that issue forth from the brain in various ways. [11]

Making # 2 (2014–2015)

Artist made sewing treadle, wire, copper, thread, 11 1/2 x 22 x 19 1/2". Making #2 includes the sewing machine base. It is entirely fabricated and features a dancing figure, delicately rendered as a wire line drawing within a circular arc that vibrates when the treadle is worked or the wheel connected to it is turned. Leaf has made many ingenious devices with triggers or other parts that activate little figures. These beg to be manipulated, evoking the delight of those 19th-century hands-on mechanical animations that seem so magical. [12]

Awards

Leaf was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, Humane Letters in 1984 from DePaul University and in 1996 from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). [4] She has received many awards including the Distinguished Artists Awards from the Canadian Council in 1984 and a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant in painting in 1989. [4]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jay DeFeo</span> American painter (1929 – 1989)

Jay DeFeo was a visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lenore Tawney</span> American artist

Lenore Tawney was an American artist working in fiber art, collage, assemblage, and drawing. She is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive. Tawney was born and raised in an Irish-American family in Lorain, Ohio near Cleveland and later moved to Chicago to start her career. In the 1940's and 50's, she studied art at several different institutions and perfected her craft as a weaver. In 1957, she moved to New York where she maintained a highly successful career into the 1960's. In the 1970's Tawney focused increasingly on her spirituality, but continued to make work until her death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ghada Amer</span> Egyptian American artist (born 1963)

Ghada Amer is a contemporary artist, much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality. Her most notable body of work involves highly layered embroidered paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">I. Rice Pereira</span> American abstract artist, poet and philosopher (1902–1971)

Irene Rice Pereira was an American abstract artist, poet and philosopher who played a major role in the development of modernism in the United States. She is known for her work in the genres of geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction, as well as her use of the principles of the Bauhaus school. Her paintings and writings were significantly influenced by the complex intellectual currents of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roni Horn</span> American visual artist and writer (born 1955)

Roni Horn is an American visual artist and writer. The granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants, she was born in New York City, where she lives and works. She is currently represented by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and Hauser & Wirth. She is openly gay.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothea Rockburne</span> Canadian-American painter (born c. 1932)

Dorothea Rockburne DFA is an abstract painter, drawing inspiration primarily from her deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Her work is geometric and abstract, seemingly simple but very precise to reflect the mathematical concepts she strives to concretize. "I wanted very much to see the equations I was studying, so I started making them in my studio," she has said. "I was visually solving equations." Rockburne's attraction to Mannerism has also influenced her work.

Diana Thater is an American artist, curator, writer, and educator. She has been a pioneering creator of film, video, and installation art since the early 1990s. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has curated several important exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and FRONT International, the 2016 Portland Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2018. In 2014, Grabner was named one of the 100 most powerful women in art and in 2019, she was named a 2019 National Academy of Design's Academician, a lifetime honor. In 2021, Grabner was named a Guggenheim Fellow by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Wilson (artist)</span> American artist

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deborah Remington</span> American abstract painter

Deborah Remington was an American abstract painter. Her most notable work is characterized as Hard-edge painting abstraction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicole Eisenman</span> American artist

Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."

Christina Ramberg was an American painter associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1960s. The Imagists took their cues from Surrealism, Pop, and West Coast underground comic illustration, and were "enchanted with the abject status of sex in post-war America, particularly as writ on the female form." Ramberg is best known for her depictions of partial female bodies forced into submission by undergarments and imagined in odd, erotic predicaments.

Kay Sekimachi is an American fiber artist and weaver, best known for her three-dimensional woven monofilament hangings as well as her intricate baskets and bowls.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LaToya Ruby Frazier</span> American artist and professor of photography

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Attie</span>

Alice Attie is an American visual artist and published poet from New York City.

Aram Han Sifuentes is a Korean American social practice fiber artist, writer, curator, and an adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Edda Renouf is an American painter and printmaker. Renouf creates minimalist abstract paintings and drawings developed from her close attention to subtle properties of materials, such as the woven threads in linen canvas and the flax and cotton fibers of paper. Renouf often alters these supports by removing threads from the weave of a canvas, or in her drawings, creating lines by incising the paper.

Torkwase Dyson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Beacon, New York, United States. Dyson describes the themes of her work as "architecture, infrastructure, environmental justice, and abstract drawing." Her work is informed by her own theory of Black Compositional Thought. This working term considers how spatial networks—paths, throughways, water, architecture, and geographies—are composed by Black bodies as a means of exploring potential networks for Black liberation. She is represented by Pace Gallery and Richard Gray Gallery.

Marilyn Ann McCoy is an American artist. During her early career she created sculptures in wood and plastic resin. Beginning in the early 1970s, she abandoned sculpture to focus on large-scale drawings in colored pencil. She was a Guggenheim Foundation fellow in 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Kaufman</span> American artist (1938–2021)

Jane Kaufman was an American artist who was affiliated with the Pattern and Decoration movement. She was also a member of the art group Guerrilla Girls.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "June Leaf". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Beer with a Painter: June Leaf". Hyperallergic. 2016-04-23. Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  3. 1 2 "June Leaf: Thought Is Infinite". Whitney Museum of American Art. 2016-04-01. Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "June Leaf Biography". artnet. Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  5. 1 2 Feitelberg, Rosemary (2016-06-17). "June Leaf Discusses Art, Whitney Show and Living With Photographer Robert Frank". WWD. Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  6. ↑ Dawidoff, Nicholas (2015-07-02). "The Man Who Saw America". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  7. ↑ "Leaf, June". The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  8. ↑ "MCA Collection: June Leaf, Arcade Women, 1956". Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  9. ↑ "June Leaf". The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  10. ↑ "The Salon by June Leaf". Minneapolis Institute of Art. Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  11. 1 2 "June Leaf: Thought Is Infinite". whitney.org. Retrieved 2019-03-29.
  12. ↑ Berlind, Robert (2015-06-03). "June Leaf". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 2019-03-29.
  13. ↑ Hunter, Becky (2010-07-01). "July 2010: Book Review: June Leaf, Record 1974/1975 and Critical Communities, RITE". WhiteHot Magazine. Retrieved 2018-01-04.
  14. ↑ Leaf, June (2016). Thought Is Infinite (Google Books). Steidl. ISBN   9783958291027.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.