A major retrospective exhibition titled "Shooting from the Heart" is currently showcasing the remarkable work of June Leaf, a visionary artist who died just over a year ago at age 94. The exhibition, featuring 120 works arranged thematically rather than chronologically, captures the explosive creative energy that defined Leaf's artistic career from her childhood awakening in Chicago through her decades of restless experimentation.
"Nobody knew what was in my mind anyway, least of all myself," Leaf said in a 2010 interview about her creative awakening as a child in Chicago. "So little did [my mother] realize that what was being developed in her house was a volcano." This volcanic energy is evident throughout her drawings, where figures and rooms seem to explode with messy residue bursting from within.
The exhibition was co-organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where it debuted, and the Allen Memorial Art Gallery at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, where it will travel next. Both institutions have longstanding relationships with Leaf's work. The show is currently on view at the Grey Art Museum in New York's Lower East Side neighborhood, where Leaf resided on and off for many years.
Despite having an avid following and a 2016 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Leaf remains oddly underknown. This may be due to her position outside the mainstream, both geographically and artistically, even while maintaining close ties with other artists. From the 1970s onward, Leaf spent considerable time in Mabou, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, a remote and wild location that provided the quiet and space needed to fuel her restless experimentation with various modes and materials.
Leaf began as a painter but soon started incorporating and tweaking found objects into works that were sometimes literally kinetic but always suggested movement. Her work remained consistently figurative, influenced by her loose association with artists like Leon Golub and the Chicago Monster Roster, as well as inspiration from Paul Klee and Jean Dubuffet. She studied and taught at the New Bauhaus in Chicago and never viewed art as the pursuit of purity of form or practice.
The artist's background in dance, which she studied as a teenager, infused her work with a performative quality. As her friend Joan Jonas, another Nova Scotia resident, notes in the exhibition catalog's foreword, there was always something of performance in the way Leaf moved and made art. Viewers themselves are propelled through space and time when experiencing her work, vaulting through a range of scales and encountering recurrent characters both large and small.
The exhibition's section entitled "To Create Life Out of Life," drawn from the name of one of her drawings, best captures this spirit. Here, her figures climb, fly, and find their balance. Sometimes they do so alone, as in the funky 3D painting "Tight Rope Walker" (1968) from her breakout show at Allan Frumkin Gallery that same year. Other times they work with a partner, as in "Man and Woman Hunting on the Ice" (1976), where a tin woman seems to push a tin man off the edge of a rod—a playfully provocative view of sexual politics that cuts through her entire body of work.
Leaf's carnivalesque play, featuring recurring motifs of arcades, miniature theaters, and hobby horses, positions her as heir to artists like Alexander Calder. However, she embeds her figures, especially women, in situations that sometimes feel threatening and psychically charged. In one group of works from around 1980, a woman's head balloons backward, as if ready to pop. These works echo the uncanny sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, often inspired by maternal relationships.
The influence of Leaf's childhood memories is evident in her use of treadle sewing machines, which she often collected and incorporated into her work. She frequently sat at her mother's feet as the latter operated a treadle sewing machine. Among the most wonderful examples is "Untitled (Theater)" (2011), where two small figures stand in a large freestanding shadow box that conjures dreamlike settings of an empty hall or the inside of a covered wagon. The piece allows viewers to almost feel the winds of memory echoing within.
The 1978 sculpture "Woman Theater" demonstrates this personal approach, featuring an oil-on-canvas woman operating a puppet theater embedded in her midsection. This work is reminiscent of Bourgeois's "Femme Maison" (Woman House) motif from the 1940s. Such works are both personal and interactive, designed to spur a kinetic response inside the viewer's head—capturing that outside-in and inside-out relationship that was key to her life's work.
"June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart" continues at the Grey Art Museum at New York University through December 13. The exhibition was curated by Allison Kemmerer, Gordon Wilkins, and Sam Adams. While the retrospective format necessarily tidies up Leaf's characteristically chaotic working process, upcoming public programs are expected to involve activation of selected works, offering visitors a more immersive experience of her kinetic art.
