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 and grandmother. Wayne had aspirations to be an artist and dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen to pursue this goal. Although she did not have formal artistic training, she began painting and had her first exhibition at the Boulevard Gallery in Chicago in 1935. Only seventeen at the time, Wayne exhibited her watercolors under the name June Claire. She exhibited work again the following year at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. By 1938, she was employed as an artist for the WPA Easel Project in Chicago.

In 1939, Wayne moved to New York, supporting herself as a jewelry designer by day and continuing to paint in her time off. She married Air Force surgeon George Wayne in 1940, and in 1942 he was deployed to serve in the European theater of World War II. While George was in Europe, June first moved to Los Angeles and learned Production Illustration at Caltech, where she received training that helped her find work converting blueprints to drawings for the aircraft industry. She then moved to Chicago and worked as a writer for the radio station WGN, moving back to Los Angeles with George when he returned to the United States in 1944. The couple divorced in 1960, but the artist continued to use "June Wayne" as her professional identity for the rest of her life.

When World War II ended, Wayne returned to Los Angeles and became an integral part of the California art scene. While continuing to paint and exhibit, she took up lithography in 1948 at Lynton Kistler’s facility, initially producing lithographs based on her paintings and then developing new imagery in her lithographs. In the late 1950s, Wayne traveled to Paris to collaborate with French master printer Marcel Durassier, first on lithographs illustrating the love sonnets of English poet John Donne and then on an artist's book also based on Donne's poetry. Wayne ultimately produced 123 copies of the finished book, one of which gained Wayne the support of Wilson MacNeil "Mac" Lowry, director of the arts and humanities programs at the Ford Foundation.

Tamarind Lithography Workshop

When Wayne met with Lowry in the late 1950s, she expressed her frustration about having to go to Europe to find collaborators for her lithography projects and Lowry suggested that she submit a proposal to the Ford Foundation seeking money to revitalize lithography in the U.S. With the foundation's assistance, Wayne opened the Tamarind Lithography Workshop (named for its street location in Hollywood), in 1960. Wayne acted as director, supported by the painter and printmaker Clinton Adams in the role of associate director and Garo Antreasian in the role of master printer and technical director.

Artists were invited to do short residencies at Tamarind, when they would work with master printers to produce lithographs. Some artists, like Tamarind's first artist-in-residence, Romas Viesulas, already had experience as print makers, while others who came to Tamarind, such as Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, Rufino Tamayo, Louise Nevelson, Philip Guston, Burhan Dogancay and Josef and Anni Albers had worked primarily in other media. Tamarind Workshop was an educational institution intent on teaching lithography to American printers and Artists. The present idea of the American Printer/Artist collaboration began with June Wayne at Tamarind Workshop. In 1970, Wayne resigned as director and the workshop moved to the University of New Mexico where, as the Tamarind Institute, it continues today.

Tapestry design

Encouraged by friend Madeleine Jarry, an author and expert on tapestry, Wayne began designing tapestries in France at the famed Gobelins factory. In the tapestry designs, Wayne continued to express her fascination with the connections between art, science, and politics, often creating designs based on images she had initially produced in other media.

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. Wayne's seminars covered various topics related to being a professional artist, such as pricing work and approaching galleries, and involved role-playing and discussion sessions. 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. 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."

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. 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.

Exhibitions and awards

In 1982, Wayne was among the first recipients of the Vesta award, a newly created annual award the Los Angeles Woman's Building bestowed on women who had made outstanding contributions to the arts. Following the closure of Tamarind Press in Los Angeles, June Wayne and her art were somewhat forgotten. But it was not until 1988, and an exhibit and award at the Fresno Art Museum that interest in her was renewed.

"June Wayne - The DJUNA Set" was the exhibition organized in 1988 by Robert Barrett, Director and Curator of the Fresno Art Museum that, along with the publication associated with this exhibition, was pivotal to the renewed interest in her work. Later June Wayne was celebrated with a full retrospective at the Fresno Art Museum as well as with one of their first annual awards for distinguished American Women Artists.

In the 1990s, Wayne won the Art Table Award for Professional Contributions to the Visual Arts, the International Women's Forum Award for Women Who Make a Difference, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Neuberger Museum of Art and LA ArtCore. In 2003, she was honored with the Zimmerli Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association and in 2009 received awards from three institutions—the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, and the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California—as well as commendations from the City of West Hollywood and Los Angeles County. She has also 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.

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.

Final years

In 2002, Wayne became a research professor at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper. 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. Wayne 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.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]