The most comprehensive exhibition of June Leaf’s work in more than three decades and the first to span the entirety of the artist’s 75-year career, this multimedia exhibition demonstrates Leaf’s expansive mind and ongoing commitment to the themes of movement, theater, gender, and the human condition.

Born and trained in Chicago and later relocating to New York after two formative stints in Paris, Leaf’s career took off in 1968 with her carnivalesque, breakout exhibition Street Dreams at Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York. In the 1970s, in tandem with her part-time move to a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia, Leaf developed her signature mode of densely layered drawings and paintings, and spindly, expressive tin and wire figurative sculptures.

Although the locations of Leaf’s studios were vastly different—one urban and the other rural—she pursued her art in both places, inventively blending media and materials in unconventional and intuitive ways. Perpetually rearranging both complete and in-progress works in microcosmic configurations, Leaf created a recurring cast of characters, compositions, and stories that synthesized outside influences with distinctive symbols drawn from her own rich self-mythology. Her figures climb, turn, and spin as they engage in a timeless struggle for agency and power within metaphysical chambers—some evocative of Leaf’s studios, others of seedy bars, dollhouses, and theater stages.

This survey, arranged thematically rather than chronologically to honor the artist’s playfulness and her cyclical returns to a core set of motifs, aims to reinscribe Leaf into the artistic legacies of the Chicago and New York milieus to which she contributed, while acknowledging that the mythic and epic aspects of her artistic vision ultimately cannot be contained within the standard movements of postwar and contemporary art. Playful and dark, ecstatic and esoteric, Leaf’s work defies categorization. Going into her studio to weld, draw, paint, and rearrange her characters every day up until her last, Leaf was an epic poet of human relations and experiences.

June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart is co-organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Allen Memorial Art Museum.

The exhibition was supported by a planning grant from the Andrea Frank Foundation. Major support is provided by the Estate of June Leaf with additional funding provided by The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, John and Sally Van Doren (PA 1980), and the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s John H. ’29 and Marjorie Fox ’29 Wieland Current-Use AMAM Support Fund.

Image: Installation view, June Leaf, Ortuzar Projects, New York, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Ortuzar Projects, New York. Photo by Dario Lasagni. © June Leaf