This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| June Claire Wayne is an abstractionist in a variety of media including, but not limited to, painting, lithography, tapestry, industrial design, and audio projects. Her work has various symbols and theories of perception that have meshed with the aims of the abstract era in which she has lived. She is credited "for a renaissance in the art of lithography in America" (Rubinstein, 341) and perceives lithography as combining the sensual and the cerebral, the slab of stone and the creative process that follows. She has an ongoing interest in philosophical and metaphysical themes, optics and science, and is fascinated by the writing of Franz Kafka.
She has also been outspoken on social issues beginning publicly with the Federal Arts Project in the 1930s and the Women's Movement in the late 20th Century. She lobbied in Washington during the Depression for the Artists Union against legislation that would have meant a loss of employment to artists. As a role model for young women artists in the 1970s, she conducted "Joan of Art" seminars to train female artists to be good business people so they could make a living.
In 1960, her Los Angeles studio on Tamarind Avenue metamorphosed into the famous Tamarind Lithography Workshop, with the aid of several million dollars from a series of Ford Foundation grants. Her motivation was her disgust with the inferior status of lithography in America, and this led her to write a proposal to the Ford Foundation with a plan to set up an American workshop to train master painters and to pursue innovative lithographic methods. Originally in Los Angeles, the Workshop attracted many outstanding artists who were there in residence, and subsequently spread across the country setting up other workshops with the same type of curriculum.
However, Wayne's devotion to the Tamarind Workshop and her goal to train people to become master hand lithographers meant neglect of her own work. In 1970, she established the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and then stepped back from it to follow her creative energy as a painter, lithographer, and maker of French tapestries.
She is also a writer, scripting an eight-part series for Public Television on artists relationships with the art world, interviewing such figures as French painter Francoise Gilot, "New York Times" art critic Grace Glueck, and constructionist wood sculptor Louise Nevelson. Wayne also produced, in 1973, "Four Stones for Kanemitsu," a film nominated for an Oscar. In the mid-1950s, Wayne was a consultant on a discussion series, "You and Modern Art," also by the Ford Foundation.
June Claire Wayne was born in 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, and her parents were first generation immigrants, who divorced when she was a baby. An exceptionally bright, independent and energetic girl, with what would prove to be an unusual ability to formulate her goals and communicate them to others, she was supported by her mother psychologically by encouraging her talents and independence and financially by selling lingerie. At age nine, Wayne began working on an illuminated manuscript of the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam. Bored with school and having skipped several grades, she left high school and home in her junior year and got a job, despite being accepted as a student by the University of Chicago. She never did attend college but later she became a part of the University of Chicago community of scholars.
At the age of seventeen, in 1935, Wayne had a one-person show of drawings and watercolors in Chicago at the Boulevard Gallery, and as a result the Mexican government gave her, the following year, a one-woman exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She traveled there gratis as a guest of that country's Department of Public Education. Shortly after, she joined the Federal Art Project and did paintings in expressionist style with thick coats of paint she applied with a palette knife.
In her early years, she had a variety of jobs including at the Marshall Field Department Store art galleries in Chicago in 1937, with an industrial design firm in New York City where she moved in 1939, and with an illustration company in California in 1941. She was also a self-taught radio script writer employed by WGN radio on her return to Chicago in 1943. All of this activity occurred between her ages of nineteen and twenty-five and during a World War. In 1941, she married a doctor with whom she had a daughter, and the family settled in Los Angeles after the War.
She made her first lithograph in 1947, having been inspired at a graphics workshop by Lynton Kisler in Los Angeles. In 1952, she was chosen Woman of the Year in the arts by the "Los Angeles Times". By 1956, at the age of thirty-eight, she had had one-person exhibitions of prints and paintings at prestigious institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Art; M.H. De Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; Art Museum of La Jolla and Santa Barbara Museum, California.
Perhaps stretching the boundaries, like so many artists of the day, of just exactly what is art in the 20th Century, Wayne, in 1988, clamped on a parachute harness, and swung from balloons while her "galactic" images were projected on another balloon.
Now, (2003) in late career, her honors, awards, prizes, exhibitions and collections are too numerous to fully list. But June Wayne's work may be found in many museums around the world, including the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Library of Congress and National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; and Bibliotheque Royale de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium.
Source:
Jules and Nancy Heller, "North American Women Artists of the 20th Century"
Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, "American Women Artists"
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