June Wayne
June Claire Wayne (March 7, 1918 Chicago, Illinois – August 23, 2011 Los Angeles, California) was an American printmaker, designer, and educator. She founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop.[1]
| June Claire Wayne | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | June Claire Kline |
| Born | March 7, 1918 Chicago, IL |
| Died | August 23, 2011 Los Angeles, CA |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Printmaking, visual art, design |
| Awards | Lifetime Achievement Awards from the College Art Association (2003), Los Angeles ArtCore (1997), and Neuberger Museum (1997) |
| Website | http://www.junewayne.com/ |
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[edit] Early life and career
Wayne was born in Chicago in 1918 to Dorothy Alice Kline and Albert Lavine, but the marriage ended shortly after Wayne's birth and she was raised by her single mother. [2] Wayne had aspirations to be an artist and dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen to pursue this goal.[3] Although she did not have formal artistic training, she began painting and had her first exhibition at the Boulevard Gallery in Chicago in 1935.[1][2] Only seventeen at the time, Wayne exhibited her watercolors under the name June Claire.[4] She exhibited work again the following year at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.[3] By 1938, she was employed as an artist for the WPA Easel Project in Chicago.[3]
In 1939, Wayne moved to New York, supporting herself as a jewelry designer by day and continuing to paint in her time off.[3] She married Air Force surgeon George Wayne in 1941, and although the couple divorced, she continued to use "June Wayne" as her professional identity for the rest of her life. [5][4] When the US became involved in World War II, she moved to Los Angeles and learned Production Illustration at Caltech, training which helped her find work converting blueprints to drawings for the aircraft industry.[3][4] Wayne later returned to Chicago, taking a job as a scriptwriter at the radio station WGN.[5]
When World War II ended, Wayne returned to Los Angeles and became an integral part of the California art scene. Along with painting prolifically and exhibiting extensively, she took up lithography at Lynton Kistler’s facility. By the mid-50s, she had become a familiar presence in Paris, as well, collaborating with French master printer Marcel Durassier to produce, in 1958, a livre d’artiste on the love sonnets of John Donne.
[edit] Tamarind Lithography Workshop
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In 1959, W. MacNeil Lowry of the Ford Foundation suggested to Wayne that she write a plan to revitalize the moribund art of lithography in the U.S. The result was the Tamarind Lithography Workshop (named for its street in Hollywood), which opened in 1960 with Wayne as its director and the Ford Foundation as its funder. She worked with artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, Rufino Tamayo, and Louise Nevelson.
By the end of the decade, Tamarind had become an international force in the printmaking arts. Feeling that she had fulfilled her mission, Wayne transferred directorship of the workshop to the University of New Mexico where, as the Tamarind Institute, it continues today. Her own lithographs are widely recognized as masterpieces of the medium.
In 1970, Wayne turned to designing tapestries in France. In them, as in the rest of her art, she expressed her fascination with the connections between art, science, and politics. Optics, the genetic code, stellar winds, magnetic fields, tsunamis, and temblors appeared in her work across assorted media, and were often expressed as metaphors for the human condition in series with such titles as Lemmings, Fables, Justice, and Love. On a more feminist (and personal) level, “The Dorothy Series” (twenty lithographs subtitled “A Documentary Film in Twenty Freeze Frames”) is a tribute to her mother, which includes a much-praised video narrated by Wayne herself.
[edit] Involvement in the Feminist Art Movement
Wayne was also involved in the Feminist Art Movement in California in the 1970s. Perhaps her biggest contribution to the movement was in education, as Wayne taught a series of professionalization seminars entitled "Joan of Art" to young women artists beginning around 1971.[6] Wayne's seminars covered various topics related to being a professional artist, such as pricing work and approaching galleries,[7] and involved role-playing and discussion sessions.[6] They also encouraged giving back to the feminist community since graduates of Wayne's seminars were required to then teach the seminars to other women.[6] Artist Faith Wilding wrote in 1977 that upon interviewing many of Wayne's former students, "all agreed that it had made a tremendous difference in their professional lives and careers, that in fact, it had been the turning point for some of them in making the step from amateur to professional."[6].
Along with fellow artists Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Ruth Weisberg, and others, Wayne was a founding member of the Los Angeles Council of Women in the Arts, which sought the equal representation of women artists in museum exhibitions.[8] She was also part of the selection committee for the exhibition Contemporary Issues: Works on Paper by Women, which opened at the Los Angeles Woman's Building in 1977 and featured the works of over 200 women artists.[9]
[edit] Exhibitions and Awards
Wayne’s art has been exhibited all over the world and is part of several museum collections, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Norton Simon Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.[10][11][12][13] She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Rhode Island School of Design, Moore College of Art and Design, California College of Arts and Crafts, and The Atlanta College of Fine Arts.[3]
[edit] June Wayne Study Center and Archive
In 2002, Wayne became a research professor at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper.[14] Wayne also donated a group of over 3,300 prints, both her work and the work of other artists, to the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, which established the June Wayne Study Center and Archive to house the collection.[14]She died at her Tamarind Avenue studio in Hollywood on August 23, 2011 with her daughter Robin Claire Park and granddaughter Ariane Junah Claire by her side.
[edit] References
- ^ a b Grimes, William (August 27, 2011). "June Wayne, Painter and Printmaker, Dies at 93". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/arts/june-wayne-painter-and-printmaker-dies-at-93.html. Retrieved November 30, 2011.
- ^ a b Weisberg, Ruth (1990). "June Wayne's Quantum Aesthetics". Woman's Art Journal 11 (1): 3–8.
- ^ a b c d e f "Celebrating the Life of June Wayne". The Art of June Wayne. http://www.junewayne.com/index.htm. Retrieved November 30, 2011.
- ^ a b c Rourke, Mary (August 25, 2011). "June Wayne dies at 93; led revival of fine-art print making". LA Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/25/local/la-me-june-wayne-20110825/2. Retrieved November 30, 2011.
- ^ a b "2008 Honorees: June Claire Wayne". Women's History Month. The National Women's History Project. http://nwhp.org/whm/wayne_bio.php. Retrieved December 6, 2011.
- ^ a b c d Wilding, Faith (1977). By Our Own Hands. Santa Monica, CA: Double X. pp. 23.
- ^ Cottingham, Laura (2000). Seeing Through the Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International. pp. 166. ISBN 90-5701-212-X.
- ^ Raven, Arlene (1988). Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh. ed. Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press. p. 230.
- ^ Brodsky, Judith K. (1994). "Exhibitions, Galleries, and Alternative Spaces". In Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard. The Power of Feminist Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. p. 113.
- ^ "Releases". National Museum of Women in the Arts. http://www.nmwa.org/news/news.asp?newsid=337. Retrieved December 1, 2011.
- ^ "Collections". Norton Simon Museum. http://www.nortonsimon.org/collections/browse_artist.php?name=Wayne%2C+June+C.&resultnum=1. Retrieved December 1, 2011.
- ^ "The Collection". Museum of Modern Art. http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A6271&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1. Retrieved December 1, 2011.
- ^ "Collections Online". Los Angeles County Museum of Art. http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=link;dtype=d;key=125526;page=701900101. Retrieved December 1, 2011.
- ^ a b "Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper". June Wayne Study Center and Archive. June Wayne Study Center and Archive. http://www.inliquid.com/features/rutgers/junewayne.html. Retrieved December 1, 2011.
