June Leaf Shooting from the Heart

A revelatory look at the singular artist best known for her deeply personal and poetic, visceral, and often allegorical works.

Published to coincide with a traveling exhibition that explores June Leaf’s (1929–2024) uncategorizable and endlessly experimental oeuvre, this volume features new scholarship alongside reflections by the artist’s peers, Joan Jonas and Kara Walker. Drawing from numerous museum and private collections as well as Leaf’s vast personal archive, it is the most exhaustive survey of her career to date.

Leaf’s enchanting and provocative kinetic sculptures, assemblages, paintings, and drawings are intermingled and juxtaposed, revealing the artist’s sustained engagement with such motifs and themes as theater and performance, dance, gender, motion, urban life, mythology, and interpersonal relationships. She skillfully blends mediums and materials in unconventional and intuitive ways, resulting in compositions where playful and combative figures and contraptions emerge from inventive combinations of brass, copper, tin, found metal rods and blades, wood, and paint.

Allison Kemmerer is the Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art. Gordon Wilkins is the Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Sam Adams is the Ellen Johnson ’33 Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.