Afternoons With June: June Wayne's Life & Art

June Wayne was an astonishingly gifted artist; a determined activist; a brilliant writer; and a gifted public speaker. Mother, grandmother and friend to dozens of remarkably creative and intellectual personalities. So begins this book. But it is hardly a sufficient description of her life. There was much more. She is probably best known for reviving the near-extinct art of lithography in 1960, establishing the Tamarind Lithography Workshop with a grant from the Ford Foundation. Major artists from across the country were invited to a residency to master the creation of lithographs. She made prize-winning films, created tapestries working with the masters of the leading weaving studios in France. She experimented with different styles in her artwork, starting with Social Realism during the Great Depression and went on to Surrealism, Abstraction, and from Pop to Op Art. She was inspired by modern science and created images of natural phenemona of tides and ocean currents, the cosmos, sky and stars. The author, Betty Ann Brown, spent many afternoons listening to June's stories. How she dropped out of high school at 15 wanting to become an artist; at 17 she had her first exhibition in Chicago, her home town; a second one in Mexico City a year later and became a "regular" on the art scene in Chicago and active in the local WPA. Her life and work provided an abundance of rich material and she was a great and brilliant story-teller.