OBERLIN, OH.- June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart, a major retrospective of the acclaimed artist’s work, will be on view at the Allen Memorial Art Museum through May 24, 2026. This landmark exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of Leaf’s work in more than 30 years and features nearly 100 works spanning seven decades in a wide range of media, including paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and collages. The presentation at the Allen is the final venue and marks the Chicago-native’s return to the Midwest.
The exhibition debuted at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts (March–July 2025), traveled to the Grey Art Museum in New York City (September–December 2025), and opened at the Allen on January 27, 2026. Drawn from the artist’s archive as well as private and institutional collections, Shooting from the Heart traces Leaf’s prolific career from the late 1940s through 2023.
Long regarded as an “artist’s artist,” Leaf exerted an influence that far exceeded her public visibility. Like many women artists of her generation, she was often overshadowed by her husband, photographer Robert Frank; this exhibition serves as a corrective moment, foregrounding a restless body of work—playful and dark, ecstatic and esoteric—that resists easy placement within any single art movement.
“The Allen is thrilled to introduce this remarkable artist to our audiences in Northeast Ohio and across the Midwest,” said the Allen’s director, Jon Seydl. “Shooting from the Heart continues Oberlin’s long tradition of foregrounding underknown women artists, and Sam Adams’s dynamic installation presents her stunning sculptures to thrilling effect in the soaring Ellen Johnson Gallery.”
Born in Chicago and trained at the New Bauhaus, Leaf’s career took off in 1968 with her carnivalesque breakout exhibition Street Dreams at Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York. In the 1970s, while living part-time in a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia, she began producing the densely layered drawings and paintings, as well as the expressive tin-and-wire figurative sculptures, for which she is best known.
Armed with indefatigable energy, an inventive mind, and a wry, closely observing eye, Leaf navigated the planes of the real and the imagined with uncommon precision. Her work is strikingly kinetic: figures wobble, jostle, climb, and spin as they struggle for agency within metaphysical chambers that evoke studios, seedy bars, dollhouses, and theatrical stages.
Adams remarks, “In recent years, many artists have moved away from sleek, highly-fabricated works to humble, hand-wrought ones. In this regard, Leaf was the original. Doggedly in the studio for hours on end, making everything by hand, the intensity of her practice is unmatched. She was a storyteller who put herself at the whim of her characters—ranging from unruly drunks and circus performers to Sisyphean archetypes of human striving.”
In her studio every day to weld, draw, and paint until her death in 2024 at age 94, the genre-defying Leaf emerged as an epic poet of human relations and experience. June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart invites renewed critical attention to the full arc of her work.
The exhibition is curated by Allison Kemmerer and Gordon Wilkins of the Addison Gallery and Sam Adams, Ellen Johnson ’33 Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. A fully illustrated catalogue published by Rizzoli Electa accompanies the exhibition, featuring reflections by artists Joan Jonas and Kara Walker, along with new scholarship by the curators.
