Navigating the grittiness of urban life and each bend of the human experience, artist June Leaf (1929–2024) created an iconic oeuvre across a career that spanned over seven decades. A comprehensive collection of her works has been arranged thematically rather than chronologically, presenting core motifs Leaf continually returned to. “June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart” debuted at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, traveled to the Grey Art Museum in New York, and is now on display through May 24 at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, its final destination.
Leaf was born in Chicago and grew up in New York City, where she had her first major solo exhibition, “Street Dreams,” at Allan Frumkin Gallery in 1968. From there, her career took off. She explored themes of kinetic movement, the feminine body, partnership, theater, and more. Sam Adams, the Ellen Johnson ’33 curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen, is one of three co-curators of “Shooting from the Heart.”
“One of the most striking, staggering aspects of her career is her drive,” Adams said. “She went into the studio every single day for 75 years. … She worked in painting and drawing but also in metal sculpture. To imagine this 94-year-old woman, every morning putting on her welding hat, her helmet, the goggles, and going down there with fire — the brute strength and energy that she devoted to her practice, I think, is inspiring for a young person.”
Starting in the 1970s, Leaf lived part-time in a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia. However, the boisterous elements of life in Chicago and New York remained with her, and she incorporated these into her work. These motifs are especially present in the first section of the exhibition, “Street Dreams,” which explores themes of theater, circuses, ballrooms, and urban life. Leaf was unafraid to combine the graceful with the grotesque, the glamour with the vulgarity.
“Her parents owned a tavern — super seedy … like vomit and piss all over the floor,” Adams said. “There was a woman who was always sitting at the bar peeing herself, … and June grew up around these characters. … She was drawn from an early age to theater and the theatricality of urban life.”
Another core theme in Leaf’s work is choreography and movement, whether by mobilizing art through gears and cranks or posing characters as if they were dancing. Leaf aspired to be a dancer from a young age. In later years, she decided that her feet were too big and she would instead devote her career to painting. However, her passion for dance never dissipated, appearing recurrently in her art.
“There’s movement in a lot of her work — incipient movement,” Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright said. “She thought of herself as someone who made things move, [who] was somewhere between a puppeteer, a fine artist, and a craftsperson. There was something in that activity of making things that had a certain kind of kinesthetic pleasure.”
Next Thursday, Albright will lead a lecture at the Allen, guiding audience members through an embodied exploration of her work. With students in her class, DANC 360: Practice as Research/Research as Practice, Albright hopes to help attendees of the event navigate new ways of thinking about and viewing art.
“It’s going to be a performative experience that gives information but also envelops the audience in a different way of perceiving so that when they go into the exhibition, they have those kinesthetic, proprioceptive, aural ways of seeing evoked in them so that they’ll approach the work a little bit differently,” Albright said. “It’s gonna be a physical embodiment of the ways of seeing June Leaf’s work.”
Like many female artists in the ’40s and ’50s, Leaf was underrecognized. Although her work was widely collected, she was often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Frank, who was an influential photographer and filmmaker during his time. On Feb. 11, Another Light on the Road: Robert Frank and June Leaf’s Canadian Home was screened in conjunction with the exhibition. The film was made in 2021 when Leaf invited friends and neighbors from Nova Scotia to remember her late husband. In this portrait, the sincerity of Leaf for her craft, her husband, and her home is evident. Dlisah Lapidus, College fourth-year and student curatorial assistant at the Allen, programmed the screening.
“It really shows June’s character, how June shows up in Robert’s work, and how Robert shows up in June’s work,” Lapidus said. “I felt like that film in particular would speak to Oberlin students [because] of the nature of collaboration. I think Oberlin students can also relate to the fantasy of living somewhere remote and having an artistic career that is quite romantic and maybe isn’t possible anymore.”
Another aspect of Leaf’s work that Oberlin students may relate to is its handwrought quality. Leaf was dedicated to making things with her hands rather than with a machine, and her pieces clearly convey her steadfast process.
“People at Oberlin are always knitting in class,” Lapidus said. “They love process-based craft. With all work, craft and process are involved, but with June’s work, it is so explicit. You can see all the little gears. You can see every place her hand went, and it doesn’t try to polish that.”
Lapidus emphasized the significance of being able to showcase Leaf’s work in an academic museum. Known as an artist’s artist, Leaf left a legacy among communities of painters, dancers, and other artists. Lapidus hopes that showing her work in an academic setting will deeply impact individuals outside of the world of art as well.
“We are able to present June Leaf to these students who are now taking her work with them as a key symbol of 20th- and 21st-century art,” Lapidus said. “Students will go on, hopefully, for many years remembering June Leaf. That’s one way an institution like this can write people [who] were formally excluded into history.”
