NEW YORK, NY.- NYU’s Grey Art Museum hosts the traveling exhibition, June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart, the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist June Leaf (1929–2024) in more than thirty years. Running from September 3 through December 13, 2025, at the Grey Art Museum at 18 Cooper Square, the exhibition explores the legacy of this influential artist, who had studios in New York City and Nova Scotia.
The exhibition spans Leaf’s artistic career, which began in the late 1940s and continued until her death in 2024. An artist, storyteller, dancer, and engineer, Leaf worked across genres, predominantly creating figurative paintings, drawings, and multimedia kinetic sculptures that the New York Times has described as “idiosyncratic and intuitive,” blending “expressionism and primitivism . . . with a childlike sense of play.”
The sweeping exhibition, which first opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in March of this year, includes drawings, paintings, collages, and metal, wire, and wood sculptures. These works are arranged thematically, highlighting the artist’s sustained engagement with such motifs and themes as the humanMetal sculpture of two figures facing each other, connected by an arching rod, with a saw-like structure in the center. drama, theater, dance, performance, motion, gender, and interpersonal relationships. Many of the works have not been shown since 1991, when they were part of a Washington Project for the Arts survey hosted by the Addison, where Leaf was an artist-in-residence.
Organized by the Addison Gallery and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, with the collaboration of the artist, the exhibition is curated by the Addison’s Allison Kemmerer, Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director, and Gordon Wilkins, Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art; and the Allen Memorial’s Sam Adams, Ellen Johnson ’33 Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
The Grey Art Museum is honored to celebrate the work of an acclaimed artist and longtime neighbor, says Michèle Wong, Interim Director. “This exhibition is a unique opportunity to showcase the inventive creations of a singular artist who maintained several studios in Lower Manhattan for more than five decades,” Wong says. “With a bold and adventurous spirit, Leaf explored essential aspects of human existence. This show offers a truly unparalleled look at her diverse practice and is a powerful testament to her contributions to contemporary American art.”
Born in Chicago, Leaf studied dance before turning to visual art at the New Bauhaus (now the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago). After two influential stints in Paris, she settled in New York City, where her first solo exhibition Street Dreams opened in 1968 at Allan Frumkin Gallery. Shortly thereafter, she began spending significant time in the remote town of Mabou on the island of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, Canada. Overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the views from her home and studio were influential—and were represented in many of her paintings and drawings.
For more than seven decades, Leaf created a recurring cast of characters, compositions, and stories that blended outside influences with symbols from her own rich self-mythology. Her figures wobble, jostle, climb, and spin as they engage in a timeless struggle for agency and power within metaphysical spaces that evoke seedy bars, dollhouses, and theatrical stages. As Leaf herself once articulated, her lifelong artistic drive stemmed from an intrinsic force: “I seem to have some kind of high-tension spring inside of me, coiled tightly. Every day, like on a trampoline, I just shoot off. I get tired jumping on that spring, I go to bed. The next morning the tightly coiled spring just Powww . . . sends me up again. I must have done something right in my long life as an artist because the wind is behind me.” (June Leaf: A Survey of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper, 1948–1991, Washington Project for the Arts, 1991).
Among the pieces on view at the Grey is The Vermeer Box (1966), which, while inspired by her childhood experience with theme-park arcades and amusements at Chicago’s Navy Pier, also speaks to the complex and theatrical dynamics of power and violence that structure the relationships between men and women. One of many works depicting couples and lovers caught in precarious balancing acts, Two Women on a Jack (2001), also demonstrates Leaf’s ongoing interest in power dynamics and opposing forces. Created in her Bleecker Street studio, Untitled (Theater) (2010–11) is among several works by Leaf that use treadle-style sewing machines paired with painted scenes or tin cut-out figures to make kinetic theaters. These intricate objects were originally designed to be animated and "worked," ideally by the artist herself or a designated individual, bringing her miniature worlds to life.
Leaf’s work is part of many private and public collections, including the Addison Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Leaf received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Fulbright award, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2024.
