June Leaf's Bleecker Street Studio Remembered as New Museum and Marc Selwyn Shows Loom

June Leaf's former Bleecker Street studio and home, shared with photographer Robert Frank, is recalled ahead of two exhibitions. The couple first rented a room in the early-1800s Federal-style building for $48 in the late 1970s and eventually bought it. The one-room studio, a former shopfront a few steps above Bleecker Street west of the Bowery, had previously housed furriers, a Chinese laundry and a stationery store. Leaf, born in Chicago in 1929, studied briefly at the New Bauhaus (now the Institute of Design) founded by László Moholy-Nagy, then spent time in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship before moving to New York in 1960, where she taught painting at Parsons. In 1975 she took a car mechanics course, learning welding and metalwork to build kinetic characters; a ten-foot-tall woman, The Head, will appear in 'The Bowery: Devil's Mile' at the New Museum. Lucy Lippard wrote in a 1978 Art in America article that Leaf was 'trying to make myths from the commonplace.' Leaf and Frank moved to Mabou on Cape Breton Island in 1969, and that house and her studio there are being preserved. Frank died in 2019 aged 94; Leaf died of cancer in July 2024 at 94, shortly after final works were shown. 'The Bowery: Devil's Mile' runs until 31 January 2027 at the New Museum, New York; 'June Leaf: A Survey' runs 6 February–20 March 2027 at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills.