“June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart,” the seismic retrospective on view at the Addison Gallery of American Art, begins subtly. Next to the exhibition’s introductory text and below a quote from the artist, a wiry sculpture of an instrument-bearing tightrope walker sits on a shelf. Titled Figure with a Horn (2023), the sculpture lends its small tin musician a sense of lightness and ease, as if walking on a wire while carrying an instrument twice one’s size could be an effortless experience. Whether this act is physically possible is irrelevant for Leaf. Instead, her work celebrates humans’ attempts to be greater than themselves through technology, performance, relationships, and art. As the artist’s writing, which is foregrounded throughout the exhibition, reveals, Leaf revels in the hilarity that can result in attempting the impossible. There is, of course, always more than meets the eye—whether that be in the case of circus acts, jokes, or artmaking—and “June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart” has a lot to see. With over 150 works across different media by Leaf, curators Allison Kemmerer, Gordon Wilkins, and Sam Adams organized the exhibition in a way that echoes the artist’s oeuvre: expansive, overwhelming, and, above all, captivating.
Born and raised in Chicago, June Leaf (1929–2024) lived the first three decades of her life in the Midwest city apart from two formative stays in Paris. Leaf studied art and art education in Chicago, developing her practice within the milieu of other Chicago-based artists like Nancy Spero and Leon Golub. Although Leaf, Spero, and Golub cannot be lumped together under a singular artistic movement or philosophy, the three shared a commitment to painting the figure despite abstraction’s prominence in mid-century American art. In the 1960s, Leaf settled in New York City, where she continued to develop the cast of characters, motifs, and settings that she returned to throughout her career, which spanned over seven decades. Then, in the 1970s, Leaf established a home and studio in Mabou, Nova Scotia, ultimately splitting her time between this remote coastal town and NYC.
Except for a few sentences in the introductory text, the typical biographic details one expects to find in a monographic exhibition are essentially absent. The curators note that the galleries are “arranged thematically rather than chronologically to honor the artist’s cyclical returns to a core set of motifs.” This invitation to make connections between the repeated motifs across the galleries is intensified by the lack of standard wall labels. Rather than provide curatorial exegeses of Leaf’s work, the curators have opted for quotes from the artist. In the context of the first gallery, where works from Leaf’s breakout 1968 exhibition “Street Dreams” at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York City are featured, this lack of didactics is quite jarring. In other words, this is no easy viewing experience; it requires patience and effort, like that required for walking along a tightrope.
Upon entering the exhibition’s central gallery, visitors are greeted by Woman Theater (1968), a multimedia painting of a nude woman with fiery hair and emerald high heels. The accompanying quote partly reads: “I wanted to show that there was a woman who was like a ‘guru’—or toy maker and she was like a spider with many arms always trying to control ‘life’—but around her was nature—free, everflowing, eternal . . . I am happy to be part of this evolution . . . I am just learning. I am a crazy plant.” Most of the label quotes in the exhibition have this oddball quality, and they serve as interesting and often funny supplements to Leaf’s densely allegorical work. In Woman Theater, for example, the edges of the painting follow the edges of the woman’s figure, making her reminiscent of a stage prop. This sense of theatricality is further emphasized by her playing with small figures that recall marionettes, three of which resemble her. On the one hand, Leaf is addressing how the objectification of a woman’s body enforces the performance of gender roles. At the same time, this is a painting of a woman “playing” with herself and sticking her tongue out in jest. These contradictory elements—the encounter between the serious and comical, in this case, or the exploration of distance and intimacy in her drawings of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, who was her husband from 1975 until his death in 2019—make each work a world unto itself where the theatrics and dramas of everyday life can unfold. Given the sheer amount of works exhibited in “Shooting from the Heart,” it can feel daunting to move through Leaf’s cosmos. Fortunately, as the curators note in their text, Leaf’s recurring cast of characters and motifs anchors her varied approach to artmaking.
In a gallery featuring a group of impactful sculptures made from a range of unconventional materials, visitors will encounter exquisite two-dimensional works that depict pieces, figures, or imagery from the three-dimensional works on view. Untitled (Theater) (2010–2011), for example, is a mixed-media sculpture whose base is composed of an antique Singer sewing machine table with a manual foot pedal. A theater-like dome sits atop the base and houses a small metal figure seated nervously by a large contraption attached to gears and a crank. The dadaist absurdity of the sculpture is clear, which is why Leaf’s quip in the label is especially welcome: “The answer to your question, ‘what is the meaning of this machine?’ It is that this little man is endlessly cranking the machine to create light…but he needs help.” Leaf’s wry humor here—toward her viewer and the “little man”—is more affectionate than cold. Hanging next to Untitled (Theater) is the painting Untitled (Hand) (2011), which depicts the sculpture accompanied by a life-size figure (perhaps representing Leaf) lending a hand to the Sisyphean man inside the dome. The pairing of these works not only elucidates the negotiation of labor, care, and desire that permeates most of Leaf’s work, but also the negotiation between artistic media. Although the sculpture has a much larger presence than the painting, the painting powerfully punctuates the sculpture.
Clear associations like this are frequent in “Shooting from the Heart,” and their connections extend throughout the galleries even when the subject matter is not identical. When one reaches the end of the exhibition, where many of the works focus on couples, the woman and man in Untitled (Theater) and Untitled (Hand) might come to mind. Leaf depicts her own hands in a moving drawing of Frank from 1979, allowing the viewer to see the scene from her perspective. The artist penned the reflection “I would like to make a movie with Robert” across her left knuckles and “It is impossible to do the same story every day” across her right. The latter statement’s mention of what is not possible might initially sound negative, but in the context of Leaf’s work, it is affirming. No matter how many times Leaf repeated the same motif, scene, or theme in painting, drawing, sculpture, or some combination thereof, each repetition resulted in something simultaneously unique and multidimensional. In the drawing of Frank, he is both the subject of Leaf’s desire and the subject of this artwork. This duality emphasizes her position as an artist to the viewer but also welcomes the viewer to identify their own links between subject matter across Leaf’s carnivalesque oeuvre. Indeed, it is hard to resist going through the exhibition several times to discover more of the connections offered by Leaf that the curators have so thoughtfully arranged. The strength of “Shooting from the Heart” is that—to borrow from Leaf’s words—it is impossible to see the same story every time.
“June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart” is on view through July 31 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, 3 Chapel Avenue, Andover, MA. Afterward, it will travel to the Grey Art Museum at New York University (September 9–December 13, 2025) and then to the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College (January 27–May 24, 2026).
