Forty years ago, when I first walked down Bleecker Street into the East Village, I thought the old shopfront building where sculptor June Leaf and her husband, photographer Robert Frank, lived and worked to be in keeping with everything about being a certain kind of artist in New York in the 1980s. It wasn't a glass-walled palace or a post-pop classical abstraction, but a fragment of the old city, a vestigial note on a block that, yes, you saw in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, but also that Melville or Poe might have passed, or even Edith Wharton if her horse-drawn carriage driver had gotten lost. After all, the Federal-style house was built in 1817 when Bleecker Street was still mostly field, though the address had developed a questionable reputation as early as the Civil War. By the 1960s, it was deemed a flophouse.
Leaf and Frank first rented a room there (for $48) in the late 1970s, and eventually managed to buy it, initially with the help of a California couple who later pulled out of the deal, the area apparently being too rough. From then on, the old brick building – its moss green-painted shopfront sporting a fire escape and shaded by a lonely locust tree – was a bulwark against all the forces that were against cities and, in a way, against the artists who worked in them. Or so it seemed to me. And when, at some point in the late 1980s, I once saw Frank sitting outside the place, on a folding chair, I felt as if he were not just studying the street but standing guard.
Frank died in 2019, aged 94, and five years later, when I was invited to meet Leaf and see her studio, I was struck by the realisation that, from a chair on the kerb, her husband could see inside to where she was working, and that, if she wanted, she could see him, too. It dawned on me that the building wasn't a fortress at all. It was a machine, or an engine, a site where, for more than half a century, June Leaf worked on dreams.
Born in Chicago in 1929, Leaf briefly studied at the New Bauhaus (now the Institute of Design), founded by László Moholy-Nagy, followed by a stint in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1960, she moved to New York, where she taught painting at Parsons and began to experiment with pieces that were part painting, part drawing, part 3-D installation, part theatre – large works that early reviewers had trouble describing and that were not much like the work of artist Red Grooms, despite the frequent comparison: they were at once darker and more exuberant, more comfortable with discomfort. ‘She is trying to make myths from the commonplace,' wrote Lucy Lippard in a 1978 article in Art in America.
Walking through the Bleecker Street house when Leaf was still there, I spotted snapshots of her life with Frank – of the two of them holding hands in Cape Breton, for instance, and then of an older Frank, beaming in her studio. They were images of love and partnership. A book-stuffed sitting room was likewise touched with details of a shared life: a refrain from On the Road – ‘Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?' said Kerouac, who wrote the introduction to Frank's photobook The Americans – pinned below a collection of miniature Statues of Liberty. A paper collage noted Frank's birthday (November 9).
But you mostly felt Leaf, who seemed to see the world as a sketch you could redraw or resee; to her eye, every little piece of Bleecker Street was a possibility. ‘Nothing is safe in this house,' she once said. ‘Real beauty is any emphatic thing we do.' Da Vinci's The Last Supper appeared as a sculpture astride the fireplace and as a print elsewhere, and it reminded you of a thing she used to say: ‘There is no artist that is more perfect than da Vinci in terms of drawing and inventiveness.' Which, in turn, reminded you of Leaf 's unrelenting quest for invention.
In 1975, while Frank was briefly teaching filmmaking in California, Leaf took a course in car mechanics, learning welding and metalwork as a way of bringing her characters to life, as little machines. Some were small, some were huge, or at least trying to be. What was meant to be a ten-foot-tall woman will be on show this autumn at the New Museum exhibition ‘The Bowery: Devil's Mile' in New York. Entitled The Head, it began as a gigantic woman, but the factory making it only got the head done, largely, Leaf told a historian, because of her. ‘It was supposed to be a man and a woman walking, but they got so tired of me at the factory because all I wanted to do was incorporate everything around me!' she said.
‘It was supposed to be a man and a woman walking, but they got so tired of me at the factory because all I wanted to do was incorporate everything around me!'
There was, famously, another house, in Mabou, on Cape Breton Island, where Leaf and Frank had moved in 1969. (That house, along with Leaf 's studio there, is being preserved.) Back then, at the time, Frank was done with New York. Leaf, however, was reluctant to leave, having only known cities. But she came to love Mabou, committed to it, falling in love with her community.
Even in her nineties, Leaf couldn't stay still for long. The studio was where her hands tried to keep up with her mind in forging dreamscapes: strips of tin were fashioned as limbs, and painted figures raced or ran or fell, and felt alive even when at rest. ‘The secret is not drawing but dance,' is written across one of her charcoal works. She drew her moving sculptures, painted her drawings' momentum and, just standing in her studio, you could see her characters moving toward meanings, inhabiting abstract truths. She once told an interviewer, ‘I make them move, breathe, you know, get up, talk back to me.'
When I dropped by, only a few months before cancer would take her away in July 2024, she was still strong and vital at 94, as sharp as a tack. We talked about writers and painters and the dance of the street, and we looked at drawings, as she demonstrated a wise and critical eye. ‘That's a very good drawing,' she said of some sketch, and I could understand the value of her praise. I watched her look long and hard, which was her secret weapon, along with seeing the playfulness in a serious world. The last pieces she worked on were naturally along the lines of what she'd been working on her whole life, and they were exhibited only a week or so before she died. A friend told me that at the very moment when the art handlers came to take these final pieces off to an exhibition, a few blocks away, she was at work in her studio.
Off to be displayed were two sculptures – of a mother and child, of a man with a spear gesturing heavenwards – as well as an older painting of a boat at sea. When I saw the sea painting, I recalled an antique painting of a shipwreck I'd seen in her home – an ocean liner's passengers evacuated in a large lifeboat, in tumultuous darkness. In Leaf 's painting, the boat feels small, the ocean vast. The ocean is not dark but complicated by synapses of bright colours; it is startlingly alive. The boat is a vessel or perhaps an opening. Maybe it is a man on the stern; maybe he is fishing for something, or maybe mourning a disconnection, his body curled in struggle. A woman lays across the bow and somehow takes centre stage, despite being pictured off to the side. She is forming a shape for rest, or for forging a dream.
‘The Bowery: Devil's Mile' will be on show until 31 January 2027 at New Museum, New York; ‘June Leaf: A Survey' will be on show from 6 February-20 March 2027 at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills; juneleaf.com
A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today
