June Wayne, “The Art of Everything”
by Andy Brumer
Fullerton Museum Center, Fullerton, California
Exhibition continues through January 5, 2025
September 14, 2024
June Wayne, “Diktat,” 1970, color lithograph printed by Serge Lozingot on Rives paper, 23 1/2 x 39”. All images courtesy of the June Wayne Estate and MB Abram.
In May of 1969 NASA’s Apollo 10 spacecraft orbited the moon and the Bart Howard song, “Fly Me to the Moon,” serenaded the mission’s astronauts through the tiny speaker of a Sony TC-50 portable cassette player. With its lyrics asking an unknown authority to permit the singer to both “play among the stars,” and to “see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars”, the tune might also locate and celebrate the cosmically focused and science-inspired multidisciplinary work of the late Los Angeles artist June Wayne. Currently the subject of a compact and immaculately curated retrospective, the Chicago-born artist is best known for the Tamarind Lithography workshop (so named for its location on Tamarind Place) she established in Hollywood in 1960. Having contributed significantly to the status of Los Angeles as a major visual art center, the Workshop lives on as The Tamarind Institute in affiliation with the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico.
Lithography masters from Europe came to Tamarind to work with many prominent artists, including Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, Sam Francis, Philip Guston, Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Louise Nevelson, Charles White, and so many others. Wayne was also known early on as an activist for the inclusion of women and minorities in the art world.
June Wayne, “The Messenger,” 1955, oil on canvas, 60 x 50”.
Beyond these contribution, one can only marvel at the breath of Wayne’s own oeuvre. Her paintings, lithographs, tapestries, and assemblages all reflect the artist’s interest in a number of scientific fields, including astrophysics, astronomy, quantum mechanics, genetics, biochemistry, the earth sciences (including seismology), meteorology, psychology, nuclear physics, and optical physics. Wayne did not allow her work to slip into a merely illustrative discourse of scientific facts and principles. As she notes in the show’s wall text, “I began to realize rather early that the more scientifically grounded I was, the less aesthetic the result …”, and that “… too close a relationship to the facts works against the (art’s) metaphysical and aesthetic potentials.”
Organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions in association with the Estate of June Wayne and MB Abram, the show is affiliated with the Getty Foundation’s latest Pacific Standard Time presentation, “Art and Science Collide.” Wayne’s body of work could hardly be a better example of this collision.
June Wayne, “Time Vista,” 1973, color lithograph printed by John Maggio on Rives paper, 35 x 25”.
Wayne nurtured a life-long romance with the majestic shape-shifting energy of physics and the imagery of matter. With a lover’s intimacy, Wayne observed the micro- and microscopic details of the world around her, no matter how close or far away. In works of great sensitivity she posed the kinds of questions children (and others) have asked since humans first gazed into the heavens: what is our place, significance and role amidst this vastness? With courage and modesty she answered, “Yes, we are very, very, VERY small … and yes, we do matter.”
The show opens with a sampling of Wayne’s youthful paintings and then presents viewers with examples of her early printmaking efforts, which reveal a precocious hand and eye. Wayne displayed this precocity throughout her career.
June Wayne, “Solar Flame” from the “Solar Flares Series,” 1981, color lithograph printed by Edward Hamilton on Rives paper, 16 1/4 x 16”.
A color lithograph titled “Time Visa” (1973) presents a luminous conical image of the artist’s thumbprint, barely recognizable as such, rendered in splatters and drips of blue and green ink. Both liminal and numinous, the print centers on a fleshy fingertip looming behind the porous inky scrim and receding into a purple bruise-colored backdrop. The image shimmers like so many stars in the night sky. As a marker and sign of human individuality, Wayne’s thumbprint mitigates what feels to many like the universe’s obliterating bleakness and brings our attention back into the personalized and intimate space of the print.
The artist’s habitual need to experiment is evident in a group of lithographs titled “Celestial Works.” Wayne wrote that no one can see the event of an actual solar flare with the naked eye. Yet she does make a virtual flare for us to gaze into. In “Solar Flame, Solar Flares,” with a swoosh of fiery light as if erupting from the sun, the refreshing colors become a tone poem of light yellows, pale whites, oxidized metallic greens, and silvery blues. All are configured into a paisley collage of universal energy.
June Wayne, “On Verra,” 1972, tapestry woven by Pierre Daquin, Atelier de Saint Cyr, 48 x 192”.
In “Propeller” Wayne takes us deeper into the recesses of the universe (as well as into the depths of our unconscious mind). The artist sculpts the central image by coating scores of stubby, built-up Styrofoam shards. She uses a skein of acrylic paint that modulates the piece into shifting shades of ashy grays and gun-metal blacks. The result is a sharp-edged, cross-shaped propeller configuration. In preparation for the creation of this and other images, the artist spent many hours visiting and talking about space exploration with scientists working at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Finally, the exhibit presents a selection of Wayne’s woven tapestries. “On Verra” (1972), the stellar example of this ensemble, is exhibited publicly for the first time. “On Verra,” French for “We will see,” gathers many of the images and interests that preoccupied the artist and summarizes her production of science-inspired art. The images in this tapestry include a central DNA helix floating in a night sky, a sunlit sea flanked by segmented rocks, an errant meteor impacting the water below the helix, and a huge tidal wave rising on the right side of the composition. The weaving, like the exhibition as a whole, demonstrates how Wayne was consistently able to fuse the source material that inspired her creatively into images of both formal conviction and poetic expression.
