NYU’s Grey Art Museum Presents June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart

By Grey Art Museum, NYU

Sep 9 - Dec 13  |  Culture

NYU’s Grey Art Museum Presents June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart

Exhibition on view September 9–December 13, 2025

The exhibition features more than 120 drawings, paintings, and sculptures representing 75 years of work by the idiosyncratic artist.

NYU’s Grey Art Museum hosts the traveling exhibition, June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart, the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist June Leaf (1929–2024) in more than thirty years. Running from September 3 through December 13, 2025, at the Grey Art Museum at 18 Cooper Square, the exhibition explores the legacy of this influential artist, who had studios in New York City and Nova Scotia.

The exhibition spans Leaf’s artistic career, which began in the late 1940s and continued until her death in 2024. An artist, storyteller, dancer, and engineer, Leaf worked across genres, predominantly creating figurative paintings, drawings, and multimedia kinetic sculptures that the New York Times has described as “idiosyncratic and intuitive,” blending “expressionism and primitivism . . . with a childlike sense of play.”

The sweeping exhibition, which first opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in March of this year, includes drawings, paintings, collages, and metal, wire, and wood sculptures. These works are arranged thematically, highlighting the artist’s sustained engagement with such motifs and themes as the human drama, theater, dance, performance, motion, gender, and interpersonal relationships. Many of the works have not been shown since 1991, when they were part of a Washington Project for the Arts survey hosted by the Addison, where Leaf was an artist-in-residence.

Organized by the Addison Gallery and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, with the collaboration of the artist, the exhibition is curated by the Addison’s Allison Kemmerer, Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director, and Gordon Wilkins, Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art; and the Allen Memorial’s Sam Adams, Ellen Johnson ’33 Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

The Grey Art Museum is honored to celebrate the work of an acclaimed artist and longtime neighbor, says Michèle Wong, Interim Director. “This exhibition is a unique opportunity to showcase the inventive creations of a singular artist who maintained several studios in Lower Manhattan for more than five decades,” Wong says. “With a bold and adventurous spirit, Leaf explored essential aspects of human existence. This show offers a truly unparalleled look at her diverse practice and is a powerful testament to her contributions to contemporary American art.”

Born in Chicago, Leaf studied dance before turning to visual art at the New Bauhaus (now the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago). After two influential stints in Paris, she settled in New York City, where her first solo exhibition Street Dreams opened in 1968 at Allan Frumkin Gallery. Shortly thereafter, she began spending significant time in the remote town of Mabou on the island of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, Canada. Overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the views from her home and studio were influential—and were represented in many of her paintings and drawings.