June Wayne

This major retrospective was organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art and the State University of New York, Purchase. This catalog includes notes by Arlene Raven, an exhibition checklist of 119 works (mostly lithographs and some paintings), detailed illustrated chronology, lengthy bibliography, and an index. "June Wayne Exhibition Captures Her Inventive, Influential Spirit: Pure light and space became a serious aesthetic vehicle in '60s Southern California. Such phenomenon-based art flowered here in the work of chaps like Larry Bell and Robert Irwin, but they had artistic ancestors. Painter John McLaughlin is frequently noted. Another less obvious precursor is June Wayne. At 80, she's something of a phenomenon herself. Her work is reviewed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in "June Wayne: A Retrospective." About time, too. Rarely seen in her adopted hometown, this cultural trailblazer has achieved more than this artistic accolade. In the '40s, she fought a City Hall that thought modern art was a Commie plot. In 1960, she founded and directed the nonprofit Tamarind Lithography Workshop. It literally saved an endangered art form. She was wife, mother and general family care-giver while actively championing feminist aims, inspiring such kindred younger spirits as Judy Chicago. Wayne is like a Renaissance figure reincarnated as a scrappy Depression-era Chicago school dropout fending off wise guys while reading John Donne. The exhibition shows her no-guff human side best in "The Dorothy Series," a portfolio of graphic-nostalgia-style prints dedicated to her mother. Its least typical but most mordant image is a Pop-literal picture of a brassiere titled "Power Net." It takes on greater resonance knowing Wayne's divorced mother was a traveling saleswoman of wares then called "foundation garments." -- Article from the LA Times on December 1, 1998 (see link).

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.