The current June Leaf exhibition at NYU’s Grey Art Museum, up through Dec. 13, is a must-see show. With 150 pieces, representing works on paper, sculptures, paintings, collages and constructions throughout her 75-year career, we get a glimpse of the infinite creativity that marks this artist’s work. From her raucous 1968 mixed-media mural-size tableau of NYC’s street characters, through to her death at age 94 in 2024, we see an artist constantly digging deeper into her unconscious, finding quiet humor within warmth and a humanistic awe of our world. It’s impossible to categorize Leaf’s work, but some consistent themes do recur, like what it is to be a woman today, particularly within the magnetic relationships between men and women, the complex interconnections we have with our mechanized world, and the magic of nature. An early work, The Vermeer Box, depicts Man as Threat, but after her 1975 marriage to photographer/filmmaker Robert Frank, and later moving with him to an isolated fishing village in Nova Scotia, she represents their togetherness with such affection that – and this is only conjecture – her skeptical attitudes toward men seem to morph into the beautiful possibilities of romance. Leaf was a poet and documentarian, an improvisational dreamer and technical expert, a social commentator and personal diarist, but fundamentally, she was an inventor, and most wonderful of all are her inventive twisted sheets of metal cut to resemble people interacting with found objects. Is the sewing machine a metaphor for women’s work, a symbol of the artist creating, or the actual conduit of life emerging as if from air? Leaf’s pieces seem to go beyond art. They seem to emerge from some hidden place, moving – always moving – through our prosaic world into the inner unconscious of life itself. On a charcoal from 2020, she writes, “The secret is not drawing but DANCE,” and so it is that ultimately the dance of life is her concern, that art miraculously emerges from life’s movements. In a video made shortly before she died, Leaf says she was always escaping her rigid, conservative mother. And escape she definitely did.

@nyugrey