June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart

June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart, a major retrospective of the acclaimed artist’s work, is on view at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. This landmark exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of Leaf’s work in more than 30 years and features nearly 100 works spanning seven decades in a wide range of media, including paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and collages. 

Following critically lauded presentations at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, and the Grey Art Museum in New York City, the Allen is the final venue, marking the Chicago-native’s return to the Midwest. Accompanying the exhibition, the Allen will host film screenings, lectures, performances, and activations by Oberlin students of dance and music. 

June Leaf (1929–2024) was born in Chicago and trained at the New Bauhaus. Her career took off in 1968 with her carnivalesque breakout exhibition Street Dreams at Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York. In the 1970s, while living part-time in a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia, she began producing the densely layered drawings and paintings, as well as the expressive tin-and-wire figurative sculptures, for which she is best known.

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 symbols drawn from her own self-mythology. Her figures wobble, jostle, climb, and spin as they struggle for agency within metaphysical chambers—some evocative of Leaf’s studios, and others of seedy bars, dollhouses, and theater stages.

Arranged thematically rather than chronologically to honor the artist's cyclical returns to a core set of motifs, this exhibition locates Leaf in the artistic legacies of the Chicago and New York milieus to which she contributed. Playful and dark, ecstatic and esoteric, the mythic aspects of Leaf's artistic vision defy categorization within any particular art movement, though her works share preoccupations with her contemporaries—including a passion for drama and urban streets, an expansive idea of the feminine, and a fascination with kinetic movement.

Long regarded as an “artist’s artist,” Leaf exerted an influence that far exceeded her public visibility. Like many women artists of her generation, she was often overshadowed by her husband, photographer Robert Frank; this exhibition serves as a corrective moment. In her studio every day to weld, draw, and paint until her death in 2024 at age 94, the genre-defying Leaf emerged as an epic poet of human relations and experience.

Co-organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Allen Memorial Art Museum, with the Allen’s presentation organized by Sam Adams, Ellen Johnson ’33 Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. 

Major support provided by the Estate of June Leaf, with additional funding from The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation (formerly the Andrea Frank Foundation), John and Sally Van Doren (Phillips Academy 1980), the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s John H. ’29 and Marjorie Fox ’29 Wieland Current-Use AMAM Support Fund, and the Barbara Nessim Curatorial Travel Award.

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About the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College 
For more than a century, the Allen has promoted the study of original works of art. Always free to the public, the museum has strong holdings in American, Asian, European, and global contemporary art, with smaller but impressive collections of African, ancient, Indigenous American, and Islamic art. The Allen’s collection of more than 15,000 works is recognized among the top academic art museums in the nation.