June Wayne's Art Featured in Track 16 Exhibition for SMMUSD Schools
by Kriss Perras Running Waters
Visual artist June Claire Wayne, born in Chicago, Illinois March 7, 1918, was raised June Claire Kline by her divorced mother, Dorothy Alice Kline, a traveling saleswoman in the corset business. At age fifteen, Wayne dropped out of high school, wanting to become an artist. Today, Wayne’s art is represented in many museum collections in the USA and abroad, including Track 16 in Santa Monica's Bergamot Station where so many internationally recognized artists have been shown. Wayne's workin October be part of an extraordinary Art Auction of more than 75 contemporary works of art donated by renowned local artists, including John Baldessari, Larry Bell, Karen Carson, Tony Berlant, Ed Ruscha, Julius Shulman, Peter Alexander and Lita Albuquerque. Track 16 Gallery will be the honored location for this exhibition.
Over 300 guests will bid on world-class paintings, sculptures and photographs. Robert Berman of Santa Monica Auctions will be conducting the live auction at 8:15 pm. The fundraiser will include wine, Ginger Margaritas by Elixir G. and hors d’oeuvres by Joe’s Restaurant and Joe’s soon to open Bar Pintxo. The Santa Monica High School String Quintet will perform.
JUNE WAYNE BIO: Some recent exhibitions of Wayne's work include: “Three Generations of Californian Feminists: Judy Dater, Kumiko Shindo, June Wayne,” Tama Art University Museum , Tokyo; “June Wayne, Pioneer Lithographer,” Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham; “How American Women Artists Invented Postmodernism: 1970–1975,” Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries, New Brunswick, NJ (traveling show: 2005–2007); and a recent inclusion in a Track 16 exhibition of feminist art earlier this year.
Wayne's aesthetic imagination resulted in her signature works of optical art such as "The Tunnel" and the Kafka series that started in the mid 1940s. When WWII ended, Wayne returned to Los Angeles to become an integral part of the California's unique art scene. Wayne took up lithography at Lynton Kistler’s facility and continued to paint and exhibit with ferocity.
By 1957, she also had become a familiar artist in Paris, collaborating with Marcel Durassier, the great master printer with whom, in 1958, she did a livre d’artiste on the love sonnets of John Donne. In 1959, W. MacNeil Lowry of the Ford Foundation suggested to Wayne that she write a plan to revitalize the art of lithography which was floundering in the USA. The result was the Tamarind Lithography Workshop (named for her street) which opened in 1960; Wayne as its director and the Ford Foundation as its financial support.
By the late 1960s, Tamarind had become an international force in the printmaking arts so Wayne transformed the Workshop into a permanent format as the TAMARIND INSTITUTE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO where it thrives to this day. 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 avant-garde linkage of art and science to issues of the times. In many media, optics, the genetic code, stellar winds, magnetic fields, tsunamis and temblors appeared in her work, often linked to metaphors for the human condition such as the lemmings series, fables, justice and love. On a feminist level, her “The Dorothy Series” -a twenty multi-color lithos that she described as a “documentary film in twenty freeze frames” - includes her much praised video which together with the suite, recently shown in Tokyo.
She has received dozens of awards as well as honorary doctorates. She also is a Visiting Professor of Research at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper but she still spends much of the year at her Tamarind Avenue studio in Hollywood, California. THE ART OF EVERYTHING, a catalog raisonné of her art (1935 to the present day) was just published by Rutgers University Press. The book is authored by Robert P. Conway with essays by Arthur Danto and Judith K. Brodsky.
The benefit exhibition will be held Thursday, October 11, 2007 6:00pm – 9:00pm with the Live Auction at 8:15pm at Track 16 Gallery Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue #C1, Santa Monica, California. For The Arts is a community-wide effort to create a permanent endowment fund to support music, visual arts, dance and drama in the Santa Monica-Malibu public schools.
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