June Leaf’s New York survey captures a life in motion

Many artists have been fascinated by movement, from da Vinci to the Futurists and Martha Graham. Physics’ objectivity aside, motion resonates with individuality – an urge for introspection on the body’s procession as well as its transcendental limits. For American artist June Leaf, who passed away in 2024 aged 94, movement became a lifelong language. Across seven decades, she transformed motion into a way of understanding the world through painting, sculpture and drawing, working daily between her studios in downtown New York and Nova Scotia, until her final days.

The Chicago-born’s incredible output is the subject of a travelling show, titled Shooting from the Heart, with a conceptual layout that eschews a chronological order to manoeuvre the visitors around a life of ceaseless curiosity for movement, both of the body and the mind. 'She just seized upon everything about life as it goes through everyday,' tells Wallpaper* art advisor Andrea Glimcher who managed Leaf’s career in her last few years. After debuting at the Addison Gallery of American Art this past spring, the expansive survey currently occupies New York University’s Grey Art Museum at stone’s throw away from Leaf’s studio in East Village.

The show absorbs those stepping into Leaf’s curious mind with two copper and metal sculptures created three decades apart. Mercury (1991) captures the artist’s common subject – the female figure – in a dramatic gesture of movement with her arms reaching above; a thin tubular form grows from her leg and curves outwards. Leaf in fact engineered the participatory sculpture to allow bubbles come out the figure’s mouth. Playfulness is also not compromised in Figure with a Horn (2023) which echoes the other sculpture’s oral suggestion with a female figure sporting the titular instrument, standing on a thin wire. The sonic gesture is embodied with the artist’s economic use of materials and volume, stimulating the viewer’s imaginative powers to crescendo the figure’s act. Glimcher who remembers witnessing Leaf tweak a coat hanger to add the work’s horn says the artist 'used sculpture to help her understand how to render something in paint.'

This attitude is nowhere more evident than Street Dreams (1968), a mixed-media trompe-l’œil of a streetscape with urban figures in front of a nocturnal Manhattan skyline. Leaf who had created the seminal work for her first solo New York exhibition at Allan Frumkin Gallery based the tableau vivant on an instance of witnessing a lively downtown diner on 2nd Avenue from a bus. Theatrical and multidimensional, the cinematic painting of stuffed canvas parts embodies a kinetic mundanity while daring to be vocal about the artist’s hand. Besides her abrupt encounter with an East Village street corner, Leaf’s childhood memories of long nights at her parents’ tavern also linger in the wall-spanning painting. 'She was a strong observer of human interactions,' adds Glimcher.

Leaf’s was married to Robert Frank for 44 years until the seminal photographer’s passing in 2019, but photography was never central to her own practice. 'She was interested in the labor and physicality of painting, sculpture, and drawing,' Glimcher explains. A few captured images, however, appear in turbulent drawings as collaged accents. Robert Carrying Wood and Don’t Watch/Don’t Bother Me (both 1973) feature cutout images of Frank and herself engulfed in her colourful acrylic gestures.

To The Sky (2022) which Leaf created around two years before her passing is a serpentine steel and wire sculpture, whirling from the floor towards the ceiling. On a ceaseless ascend, a small figure climbs the narrow path – relentless and self-assured, she seems unbothered by the road’s steepness or the unknown ahead. Culminating the exhibition’s New York edition, the sculpture radiates the early ambitions of a sixteen-year old Leaf who decided to be an artist after watching dancer Angna Enters on stage. It’s a fitting finale for an artist who spent a lifetime turning motion into meaning, with an unchanged desire to explore what life has to offer through art.

Shooting from the Heart remains on view at the Grey Art Museum through December 13, 2025 and runs at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College between January 27 and May 24, 2026.