Artist June Leaf, known for her experimental and intuitive curiosity about movement, gesture, and the female form, died on Monday, July 1, at her home in New York City at the age of 94. Leaf’s death was confirmed by her agent and close friend, Andrea Glimcher of Hyphen Advisory, who said the artist had recently been diagnosed with stomach cancer.
Born in Chicago in 1929, Leaf knew from a very young age that she wanted to work with her hands, especially when she saw her mother sewing. She recalled in a 2016 interview Allergic She once asked her mom to draw a high heel and then began describing all of its faults, and soon realized she had to get her hands dirty to document the world around her. This lesson was expanded in elementary school, when she developed a passion for drawing, but she discovered that the other half of the battle was getting her work seen.
At age 18, the artist briefly attended the Illinois Institute of Technology’s School of Design, which was founded by László Moholy-Nagy and known as the New Bauhaus. But she was more interested in the school’s visiting artists than the coursework itself, so she left in 1948 and traveled to Paris for a year. She returned to Chicago and earned a bachelor’s degree in art education from Roosevelt University in 1954 and a master’s degree in the same field from the Institute of Design in 1956, before returning to Paris to study painting in 1958-1959 on a Fulbright Scholarship.
In 1960, Leaf moved to New York City, where she made a splash at the Allan Frumkin Gallery with her grandiose compositions and extended three-dimensional media. Vermeer’s Box (1965), The Ascension of Mrs. Pig (1968), and Woman’s Theater (1968) are representative works of the artist’s key experiments in sculpture and three-dimensionality, the latter of which received direct praise from art critic Hilton Kramer, who, in his review of Leaf’s solo exhibition, described her as “a poet with a taste and a flair for complex imagery.”
The artist lived and worked on the Lower East Side, and after falling in love with photographer Robert Frank, the two sought a space in Nova Scotia, away from the distractions and hierarchy of New York City, to focus on their work. Frank and Leaf bought a house in the small town of Mabou on Cape Breton Island and immersed themselves in the community, devoting themselves to their practice whenever they left the city. The two married in 1975 and remained together until Frank’s death in 2019.
Whatever the public thinks of her, the artist’s agent and friend Glimcher insists that “Liv’s audience is herself.”
“She’s so focused on the process of what she does, she might even call it ‘the journey,'” Glimcher told Allergic“She worked entirely on her own – heating and welding metal, twisting wire as sensitively as an embroiderer, and painting until exhaustion every day.”
A lover of ballet and theatre, Liv is determined to convey and incorporate movement in her art – from interactive kinetic works, such as her series of fabric scrolls painted on lever cranks, to her figurative paintings and drawings, where the presence of the hand shines through in the tactile application and manipulation of her medium. Every stroke, swipe and scrape is as important as the subject she presents. In a 2016 interview, she described her obsession with including certain figures or “characters” in her work until she “eventually got rid of them.”
“I’m a painter who has to have a tactile experience of the world,” Leaf said.
For decades, Liv has been featured in group and solo exhibitions across the United States and Canada. In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective focusing on her works on paper, and in 2022, Ortuzar Projects Gallery held a solo exhibition that put Liv in the spotlight.
“All who met her remember Liv for her independent spirit, playful humor and all-encompassing artistic practice, where everything she touched seemed to come alive,” the gallery said in a statement. Allergic.
The artist’s work is currently included in Mother Lodea group exhibition at the James Cohen Gallery in Manhattan through July 21, and Dual Threshold It is on view at the Winter Street Gallery in Edgartown, Mass., until July 7. Glimcher also noted that in 2025, a traveling retrospective of Leaf’s work will travel from the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., to the Gray Museum of Art in New York and the Allen Memorial Art Gallery in Oberlin, Ohio.
