Reading Beyond the Fine Prints

Working on a new lithograph a few years ago, June Wayne recalled a production illustration she’d made in 1943 detailing the internal structure of an airplane. She recycled the drawing, making it the central image of her 1996 print “Nacelle.”

“It amuses me to take ideas that were more than 50 years apart and combine them,” says Wayne. “I find there’s a continuity in my work, and its parts all live very happily with one another.”

All those parts go on view Nov. 19 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. First mounted last year by the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., “June Wayne: A Retrospective” highlights the career of an 80-year-old artist, feminist and social activist who always kept in mind her grandmother’s warning to “never mistake a spit in the eye for rain.”

That activism, compounded by her prominence from establishing the influential Tamarind Lithography Workshop, has often shoved Wayne’s own artwork out of the spotlight. Despite creating hundreds of prints, paintings and other pieces on subjects as diverse as the justice system, her mother and the Northridge earthquake, and despite more than 70 solo exhibitions here and abroad, she was still referred to recently in a New York Times art review as a “little-known figure.”

With more than 100 of Wayne’s paintings, collages, tapestries and prints, many of the last drawn from LACMA’s collection, the exhibition should throw light on her work, as well as reinforce her place in art history. Notes Victor Carlson, the LACMA senior curator of prints and drawings who organized the exhibition here: “It seemed an appropriate moment, as June enters her ninth decade, to recognize the role that she’s had in the art community in Los Angeles.”

That role pivots on her 1959 founding of Tamarind, a Ford Foundation-funded printmaking workshop that drew in part on Wayne’s own experiences working for the Works Progress Administration in Chicago in the late ‘30s. Under Wayne’s aegis for a decade in Los Angeles, Tamarind trained dozens of master printers, provided fellowships to about 200 artists from around the world and established lithography as an important art medium in the United States.

“I’ve always felt that June was the person who was responsible for the whole print publishing revolution in America,” says Jean Milant, who trained at Tamarind in 1968-69, became a master printer and opened Cirrus Editions in L.A. in 1970. “She was Tamarind, and it was her vision that created all of us. I think most of the people in this business can somehow be tied back to Tamarind.”

Wayne still occupies that same Tamarind Avenue studio complex in Hollywood where she trained printers in the ‘60s and analyzed professional problems for female artists at her “Joan of Art” seminars in the ‘70s. Petite but forceful, Wayne hardly seems an octogenarian as she talks about her recent lecture and exhibition opening in Cincinnati or moves briskly about her studio, pulling out prints or documents to illustrate a point.

Raised in Chicago by her mother and grandmother--her parents separated when she was an infant--Wayne is self-taught as both scholar and artist. A “chronic truant,” she spent many school days at the library, dropping out of high school at 15. Her first job, putting labels on whiskey bottles, lasted three days (and, she told a recent art symposium audience, “put me off liquor for the rest of my life”), but she soon concentrated on art and never went back to school.

She was first attracted to art as a child, noticing how in the comics, dots combined to make colors. She was making drawings composed of colored dots by the time she was 13, and at 17 had her first solo exhibition.

A jewelry designer first in Chicago, then in New York, she moved with her then-husband, George Wayne, to Los Angeles in the 1940s. (She divorced Wayne in 1960, and, in 1964, married her current husband, Arthur Henry Plone.) She studied production illustration here, a career detour that contributed to her lifelong interest in science and space, and she worked briefly in the aircraft industry.

Wayne turned to lithography in the late 1940s, seeking a better way to create an optical effect she wasn’t able to achieve in her paintings. In the U.S. she found lithography limited in both techniques and materials, so she traveled to Europe to work with printers there.

Continuing to paint, draw and make prints, in the late 1950s Wayne met with Ford Foundation executive W. McNeil Lowry, explaining to him why she went to Europe to work and why simple arts grants weren’t the solution. At his request, she followed up with a proposal for Tamarind. Over the next decade, Tamarind published approximately 3,000 print editions by such artists as Josef Albers, David Hockney, Louise Nevelson, Richard Diebenkorn and Edward Ruscha.

Tamarind relocated to the University of New Mexico in 1970, freeing Wayne to return to full-time art-making, which included prints and, soon, tapestry design as well.

But she had paid a price professionally. Given her close association with Tamarind, says Neuberger Museum director Lucinda H. Gedeon, “June lost momentum in terms of the visibility for her own creative work. People didn’t know or hadn’t paid due attention to the fact that she was also a wonderful painter and colorist and translated so many of her images into tapestry designs.”

Wayne’s images come from everywhere: One lithograph reflects the coronas of light she saw as a child looking up into the horse-drawn wagon that came through her neighborhood selling waffles. “My work is peppered with references I draw on as I need them,” she says. “They are timeless. They have a utility beyond the moment.”

Wayne’s interest in space, for example, is reflected in the images in her 1958 book of lithographs inspired by John Donne poems. Sputnik inspired her, as did the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the space program. “All these things caused or retriggered my interest in the nature of energy, the universe, magnetic fields and such,” says Wayne. “I sit by a lot of riverbanks, and, sooner or later, things that I’m interested in float by.”

Her “Burning Helix” series, sparked by a fascination with DNA, is in the collection of UCLA’s Institute of Molecular Biology. And an article in Newsweek magazine a few years ago led to a series on “knockout mice--lab mice from whom the geneticists have knocked out this or that gene in order to be able to determine the role played by that.”

Few of her pieces, in fact, are so personal as her frequently exhibited “Dorothy Series” of 1975-79. Wayne’s artistic biography of her mother, Dorothy Kline, a traveling saleslady, “is a personal and yet paradigmatic story of so many American immigrants,” observes Nancy Berman, museum director at the Skirball Cultural Center, which mounted an exhibition of that series in 1996. “Her mother’s struggle, competence and mastery was a model for June in her own career.”

As illustrated by the “Dorothy Series,” which is included in the LACMA retrospective, Wayne also learned activism from her mother. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her defense of artistic freedoms. Wayne, who would later call the arts “the rain forests of society,” went to Washington, D.C., in 1938 to lobby against discontinuation of the WPA art project in Chicago. She took on McCarthysim in the 1950s, protesting a Los Angeles City Council resolution that she says called modern artists “tools of the Kremlin.”

Wayne leavens her ferocity with wit and well-honed storytelling skills, but she has never been timid about what she believes in. “If something is happening to me, I know it’s happening to a lot of other people,” Wayne says. “I’m very attuned to what’s happening to my own kind.”

Feminist artist Judy Chicago recalls that when she was first organizing women’s art programs, “June showed me what she had done at Tamarind. I admired her for the courage it must have required for her to hold her ground in an environment that was not only not supportive but openly hostile to women of aspiration. Strong women in that period were very unpopular in the art scene, and I remember being very impressed by what she had envisioned, organized and implemented. It was inspiring.”

Wayne shows no signs of slowing down now. A writer of radio scripts in the 1940s and of a KCET television series on art she hosted in the ‘70s, she has been gathering her assorted writings together for an anthology. But with the Neuberger and LACMA retrospectives and their attendant events--the USC School of Fine Arts is sponsoring a print symposium Nov. 17, for instance--she’s just “too busy to meet the publishing date this year,” she says. “It’ll come out next year.”

More than 70 friends and colleagues who turned out to celebrate Wayne’s 80th birthday earlier this year raised funds for LACMA to buy a recent Wayne artwork, says the event’s co-sponsor, Robert Barrett, who is associate vice president of cultural tourism at the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau. “June has mentored generations of artists, collectors and patrons,” Barrett says. “She is a Los Angeles treasure.”

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“JUNE WAYNE: A RETROSPECTIVE,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Dates: Nov. 19-Feb. 15. Phone: (323) 857-6000.