Nearing 80, June Wayne is still pursuing the highly productive career that began when she dropped out of high school at the age of 15. Her most renowned achievement was founding , in 1960, the Tamarind Lithography Workshop - now the Tamarind Institute of the University of New Mexico - credited with reviving fine art lithography in this country. But she's also a painter, printmaker, creator of tapesteries and jungle fighter for the arts.

Unattuned to "mainstream" trends like Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and other manifestations, Ms. Wayne went her own way, which is not to say that her work has been uninfluenced by these movements. But her themes are drawn from science, literature, personal experience and social issues. And her jumbo retrospective at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y., in Westchester County, has a long reach, going back to 1948. Observing light effects in a tunnel, she was prompted to base some works on optical principles, as in the striking painting "The Tunnel" of 1949. The show ends in 1996 with visual meditations, no less, on the atom bomb and the problems posed by genetic engineering. In between, she plunged into a wide range of projects, mediums, styles and subject matter, with uneven results, to be sure. The work dealing with social themes, for one example, is often glib and cliched, when it is not fuzzy and unfocused.For another, the mid-1980's series of dense, heavily textured fields in gold, silver, black and other colors, titled "Cognitos" and the "Djuna Set", seem decorative. While meant to be cosmic, they suggest rather shallow Minimalist ideas of the 1970's. Does the overall interest of Ms. Wayne's work justify the extensive exposure made possible by the Neuberger's grand spaces? Hmm.

But no one can accuse her of timidity about trying new approaches. A surrealist influence pervades the early part of this show, most effectively seen in two rather sprightly complementary paintings, "The Chase" (1949) and "The Elements" (1951). Each has a long horizontal format, divided into horizontal bands of color; each band sports a row of strange morphs arranged at intervals like musical notes. Another, "The Hero" (1949), whose imagery refers to Kafka's writings, again depicts a morph, in gold on a shiny black ground, who, carrying a banner, soars and stumbles his way by a series of watery ramps from the top of the picture to a precarious position at the bottom.

Skip to the 1970's, when Ms. Wayne did some of her best work in the form of large-scale tapesteries. They are mostly on the theme of big waves, a familiar motif in Japanese prints. Hers were inspired, she says, by the tossings and heavings of Lake Michigan, witnessed during her childhood in Chicago. The few visual artists making tapesteries today usually translate their work from other mediums. Not Ms. Wayne, who considers these fabric hangings a breed of graphic art, worked directly, doing a full-scale cartoon for each piece and closely supervising its production at one of three French ateliers.

The results are particularly impressive in "Grande Vague Noire" (1976), a three-tiered monster in blue, black and white rearing on a ground of buff-pink, and "Lame de Choc (Shock Wave)" (1972), a sprawling dragon of wave in black and white whose amorphous shape is backed by geometric bands of color.

Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the wave theme recurs in an arresting group of multi-color lithographs of the 1980's devoted to celestial phenomena. On view at the Neuberger, and at the New York Academy of Sciences, these small works make up three lithographic suites: "Solar Flares" from 1981 and "My Palomar" from 1984.

In "Debristream", from the "Stellar Winds" series, a sort of oceanic drift of black lines and white spume moves across a brilliantly aqua-blue ground, a graceful fusion of image and color. "Solar Refraction", from the "Solar Flares" series, presents "waves" in a warm range of oranges and reds, rising against a rainbow background from what appears to be a dense solar disk. In each work of the "My Palomar" series, there hovers a roving square, inflecting a distant, spacey field. One of the most elegant, "Earthscan", presents part of a yellowish-green square poised at the edge of a vast cosmos inflected by a trail of green spume. In these works Ms. Wayne demonstrates her command of a tricky medium.

The most personal part of the Neuberger show is a witty but affecting tribute to the artist's mother, called "The Dorothy Series", from 1975-1979. In 20 lithographs (accompanied by a video with Ms. Wayne's narration) that include photos and other memorabilia, it tells the bittersweet story of a Russian immigrant girl (Ms. Wayne's mother) who grew up in Chicago, had two bad marriages, was a social activist and enjoyed a long career as a successful corset saleswoman for the Paris Garter Company. My favorite image is a full- length figure of Dorothy surrounded by garter attachments as large as she is. On a scale of 1 to 10 for the whole show, I'd give "The Dorothy Series" a 9 for its unpretentious lightness and charm.