The Standard

Artillery and The Standard, Hollywood have joined forces again to bring you a reading and book signing by art historian Betty Ann Brown. Betty Ann Brown’s new book, Afternoons With June: Stories About June Wayne’s Art and Life, is a tribute to the intelligent, eloquent and generally fearless artist June Wayne. The event will be held on Tuesday, March 13th. The wine will start flowing at 7pm. The reading and book signing will commence at 8pm.

Born in 1918, Wayne, pictured here at age 89, had her first solo exhibition in 1935 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

June Wayne — painter, feminist, intellectual and and founder of the legendary printmaking facility, Tamarind — died last year, but not before cutting a swath through 20th-century art and culture that took her all the way from the WPA movement in Chicago and New York’s avant garde in the 1930s to the Los Angeles postwar world of rocket scientists, Hollywood and the rise of West Coast modernism. One of those seminal figures whom everyone knows of but few know much about, Wayne grew up with Saul Bellow, was invited at age 17 by the government of Mexico to show her art, performed in a play by Picasso along with her contemporaries Red Grooms and Louise Bourgeois, discoursed with scientists like Richard Feynman about applying the cosmic scientific method to creativity, and lived to see a huge hometown retrospective of her tapestries at the Chicago Art Institute at the ripe age of 92.

Wayne with her work “Propeller,” which is made of styrene, acrylic and mahogany, at her Tamarind Avenue studio in Los Angeles. (Photo by Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

In Afternoons With June: Stories About June Wayne’s Art and Life, art historian Betty Ann Brown mixes anecdotes about Wayne’s life—and her many famous friends—with analyses of her remarkably diverse artworks and rich historical research. The text is based on more than two years of interviews with the artist and wonderfully illustrated with photographs by Niku Kashef. Ruth Weisberg wrote the Introduction and Larry Workman, now Director of The June Wayne Collection, contributed the Afterword. The volume was beautifully designed by Ruth Ann Anderson.