New York is quick to call dibs on June Leaf, since she was part of the city’s historic Bleecker Street scene (the street gets its bohemian cred for being HQ for generations of bohemians, a longstanding locale for Leaf and her contemporaries as they re-shaped abstract art in a post-World War Two era). The Whitney Museum’s significant 2016 retrospective on Leaf doubled down on both her significance to NYC and its significance to her (not for nothing was her first lauded work a drawing of Coney Island). But, just as the artist’s work has always straddled two planes—the real and imaginary; the inward and outward—so is it indebted to two places.
The second one? Mabou, Cape Breton. She and her husband Robert Frank (the Jack Kerouac of photography, capturing the nation’s face most famously in 1958’s The Americans) moved to Mabou in the late 1960s, living there full-time for years and summering there until Frank’s death in 2019. (It was also in Mabou that Leaf’s kinetic sculptures arguably reached their finest points: Works like a woman who has hands shooting out her heart; a man climbing stairs and a woman walking are animated as the viewer pulls a trigger.)
On view at Halifax’s Blue Building Gallery until June 24, June Leaf in Mabou Since 1969 shows the significance of the artist’s second home: “Centering on landscapes, figuration and portraiture, the exhibition shares Leaf’s deep desire to show how much Cape Breton has meant to her life and art practice,” the show description offers. Curated by The Blue Building’s founder and director, Emily Falencki, it arrives in Halifax after showing last year at the Inverness County Center for the Arts, where, the description notes, “the exhibition received record-breaking attendance.”
The show features kinetic sculptures (possibly Leaf’s most-noted genre of work) alongside paintings and a collection of never-before-seen drawings. More than 50 years of Leaf’s career is on view, an ultimate crash course not just in the Cape Breton connoisseur but in the recent history of modern art itself (since Leaf’s work was so influential and weathered many movements and scenes).
“It’s quite a wonderful experience, for a person from a big city to have had to adjust to a rural community,” Leaf told The New York Times Style Magazine in 2022 about June Leaf in Mabou Since 1969. “I knew they had an impact on Robert and me, but I didn’t realize what an impact we had on them.”
Catch June Leaf in Mabou Since 1969 Thu-Sat noon-6pm at The Blue Building, 2482 Maynard, until June 24.
This article appears in Jun 1-30, 2023.