NEW YORK, NY.- Galerie Lelong, New York, announced its representation of the Los Angeles-based artist June Edmonds. Edmonds will have her first solo show with the gallery in Fall 2025, marking her first major solo exhibition in New York.
June Edmonds is known for her dynamic abstract paintings, rendered in bold palettes of acrylic, which draw inspiration from her ruminations on Black history and her own African American roots. Her works reference specific events, individuals, and traditions, amassing an oeuvre that honors Black joy, strength, resilience, and power. Among the topics Edmonds has engaged in past bodies of work are the Great Migration, the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, and the reimagination of the American flag to recognize the long-standing commitment and sacrifice of African Americans in the fight for democracy and justice—lending weight to, and offering new perspectives on, varied histories.
Over a three-decade long career, Edmonds has developed a signature language of abstraction that embodies meditation and spirituality. She populates her paintings with geometric forms comprised of compounding bands of vivid color. Using impasto techniques, Edmonds incorporates a tactile, dimensional component to her paintings. Through her use of repetitions and patterns in color and texture, Edmonds invokes a meditative experience both in process and for viewers.
“We are excited to welcome June Edmonds to the gallery and proud to present her first solo exhibition in New York,” said Mary Sabbatino, Vice President and Partner at Galerie Lelong. “ Edmonds’s command of color and her deep investigation of symbolic forms specific to the African American experience in California, add significantly to the dialogue of abstraction today.”
Edmonds’s forthcoming exhibition, opening September 4, 2025, will present new paintings featuring an ebe-amẹn, or river leaf, motif. This stylized quatrefoil form was used prominently in Benin metallic plaques and was associated with the power and protection of kings and deities. In this body of work, Edmonds takes this form—often used to pattern the background of the plaques—to the foreground, abstracting the curved forms and increasing their size. Comprising her quatrefoils in repetitive bands of vibrant color, Edmonds invokes the historic form with a feeling of personal serenity; the river leaf motif retains its quiet power and resonance as an emblem of resilience and protection that speaks across time.
Edmonds was the subject of a mid-career survey at the Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California in 2021, and in 2022 was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her work can be found in the collections of institutions such as the California African American Art Museum, Los Angeles; Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts; and the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts.
Galerie Lelong, New York represents June Edmonds in collaboration with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Edmonds lives and works in Los Angeles, California, where she was born in 1959.
