As a child, the late artist June Leaf approached a teacher to show her a drawing she had made of a Biblical scene. Without even looking up, the teacher assumed Leaf was asking for permission to go to the bathroom. “I looked at her, and I looked in my hands, and I thought, Oh. That’s how it is. You can make something and you see it. But then you have to spend your life to get the world to see it,” Leaf recalled in an interview with Hyperallergic.
Decades later, the world is finally ready to see Leaf’s wide-ranging body of work. The artist, who died last summer at 94, created drawings, paintings, and sculptures in media from colored pencil to twisted wire. Leaf’s theatrical debut in 1968, Street Dreams—a show of puppets and marionettes staged within an imaginary theater—set her on a 75-year path of genre-agnostic, playful experimentation.
Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue co-published by Rizzoli Electa with contributions from artists Kara Walker and Joan Jonas, as well as screenings of recent films—one shot at Leaf’s longtime Bleecker Street studio in New York, and another reflecting on her life with her husband, the photographer Robert Frank, in their secluded second home in Mabou, Nova Scotia—at Anthology Film Archives.
“This is a long-overdue opportunity to examine the career of one of the boldest and most adventurous artists of her generation,” Allison Kemmerer, director of the Addison, shared in a statement.
in your life?
