1918 March 7 June Claire is born, the only child of Dorothy Kline and Albert Lavine. She used her mother's maiden name because her parents divorced when she was an infant. June did not meet her father until 1956 when she searched him out to get information for a passport. Dorothy supported both June and Florence (Dorothy's widowed mother).
1933 Decides to be an artist, drops out of high school, supports herself at various factory jobs, takes entrance exams for the University of Chicago, but decides not to enroll. Nonetheless, she becomes a part of university life through friendships with scientists, artists and writers including many who later became world famous.
1935 First of more than 60 solo exhibitions: Watercolors by June Claire, Boulevard Book Shop and Gallery, Diana Court, owned by Max Lippitt, a noted Chicago book dealer on Michigan Avenue.
1936 Invitation from the Mexican Department of Public Education to paint in Mexico, culminating in a solo exhibition in October, Cuadros de June Claire, at El Palacio de Bellas Artes.
1937 Works for Marshall Field and Company in their Modern Art Picture Galleries, where she learns about retail art marketing.
1938 Applies for and is accepted by the Easel Project of the Works Project Administration (WPA), Chicago. Her milieu includes artists Julio de Diego, Arthur Lidov, Gertrude Abercrombie, Abe Aaron, Harold Jacobson, Sidney Loeb, Canada Lee, Josh White, Charles White, Si Gordin, Bernard Brindel, Saul Dorfman, Edward Millman, Mitchell Siporin, Bernard Rosenthal, Margo Huff, Emerson Woelffer, Peter Pollack and many other Chicago notables in the arts and sciences. Joins the Artist's Union, which seeks to preserve the WPA Projects as permanent government agencies. Successfully testifies before a Congressional Committee in Washington against a policy discharging WPA artists every thirteen weeks.
1939 Based on ornaments she made for herself, accepts her first well-paying job as a jewelry designer-stylist in the garment industry in New York City. Continues painting and participates in various exhibitions.
1940 Marries USAF flight surgeon George Wayne, who spends the next four years in the China/Burma/India theater of World War II.
1941 Moves to Los Angeles, contacts rheumatic fever. Painting becomes too strenuous so she teaches herself to write for radio. Also becomes certified by Cal Tech/ Art Center School in aircraft production illustration (multi-point perspective translated from blueprints).
1943 Moves back to Chicago to work for WGN radio as a staff writer of war bond programs and music continuity.
1944 Dr. Wayne returns from overseas and daughter, Robin Claire, is born.
1945 After a nomadic year living in Army towns, settles permanently in Los Angeles on Rampart Blvd. where the garage becomes her studio.
1946 Enters a California milieu of filmmakers, writers, artists, musicians and scientists. Important friendships begin with art critic Jules Langsner, Walter and Louise Arensberg, Man and Julie Ray, Ray and Charles Eames, John Entenza, Anna Mahler, Peter Krasnow, Knud Merrild, Oscar Fischinger, Max Yavno, Donald Bear and a large colony of European refugees working in the arts and sciences.
1947 - 52 Works intensively on her art, exploring those aspects of optics, including focal and peripheral vision, where the rules of perspective become aberrant. Fascinated by the molecular nature of matter and the interchange of time and space.
1948 Visits workshop near her studio of Lynton Kistler, one of the few artists' lithographers in the United States. Rents a stone for $5 and thus begins her lifelong interest in lithography. With Kistler creates lithographs expanding on optical ideas, which she also explores in painting. Content includes optical illusions, allegorical images relating to Kafka and scientific references including fission and the atom bomb.
1949 - 1956 Develops narratives using original, personal and fluid symbols. They provide allegorical opportunities to use aspects of optics long known to science but untouched by artists.
1950 First solo exhibition of her work on the West Coast at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, June Wayne - Paintings, Drawings, Space Constructions, Lithographs. Numerous one person exhibitions at museums throughout the 1950s in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pasadena, Chicago, New York, La Jolla, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. Built a studio and house designed by Alvin and Elaine Lustig, at 1365 Londonderry Place.
1950 - 58 Uses transparent crystalline modules, which serve as a conceptual framework for creative ideas to be freely structured with rhythmic energy.
1950 Receives first Purchase Prize, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Awarded numerous purchase prizes throughout the 1950s from Otis Art Institute, Library of Congress, American Society of Graphic Artists, Los Angeles All-City Art Festival, San Jose State College, Society of Washington Printmakers, Pasadena Art Museum and Philadelphia Print Club.
1952 Receives Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year Award for Meritorious Achievement in Modern Art. 1953 Together with Langsner organizes a discussion series using the techniques of the Fund for Adult Education of the Ford Foundation entitled "You and Modern Art," on how to look at modern art as a political counterweight to McCarthyism, which had caused the Los Angeles City Council to declare that all modern artists "are unwitting tools of the Kremlin." Remained involved with this project through 1960.
1957 - 58 Begins annual trips to France. In a hectic marathon of 70 days, creates the livre deluxe, Songs and Sonets by John Donne, December 25, 1958. 15 lithographs: 12 in black and white; 3 in color. Edition: 110. Printed in Paris by Marcel Durassier. One of the first American artists to illustrate a great poet, the book is included in the influential 1961 exhibition, The Artist and the Book, 1860-1960.
1958 Acquires a large studio at 1112 North Tamarind Avenue, Los Angeles. 1959 Still engrossed in lithography and worried about its moribund condition in the United States; Wayne writes an imaginative but unorthodox plan for W. McNeil Lowry, Director of the Ford Foundation's Program in Humanities and the Arts. This plan is a blueprint for how lithography can be restored through the systematic recreation of master-printers to work with U.S. artists. Following the "marvelous, exasperating, invigorating" experience of Donne's love poems as lithographic images, in 1960, June Wayne "put herself aside as an artist" to do something for lithography. She eventually devotes ten years of her life to "ensuring the future of an art form I love." (Letter of April 21, 1959, Tamarind Archive).
1960 A year of public success and private loss. The Ford Foundation funds Tamarind Lithography Workshop (a non-profit corporation), which opens on July 1 with June Wayne as Director, Clinton Adams as Associate Director and Garo Antreasian as Technical Director and first master-printer. Shortly thereafter, her mother and grandmother die and she divorces Dr. Wayne.
1962 The initial grant of $185,000 from The Ford Foundation is supplemented with an additional $400,000 through 1965. A third grant of $900,000 funds the workshop until 1970. Applies mass production ideas from jewelry industry to units of effort and money that go into printmaking. More than 150 artists from the United States and abroad worked at Tamarind during those years, creating more than 3,000 editions, which constitute a unique and invaluable record of that decade in art and ideas.
1964 Marries Arthur Henry (Hank) Plone.
1965 Travels to Europe to search for stones and develop papers for lithography.
1968 Solo exhibition, Thirty Years of Lithographs by June Wayne, The Art museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
1969 Writes the narration for the film, The Look of a Lithographer, a Tamarind Production, directed by Jules Engel, photography and editing by Ivan Dryer (16mm b/w/, sound, 45 minutes). Begins Tamarind production of Four Stones for Kanemitsu, a documentary film on the creation of a four-color lithography by Matsumi Kanemitsu using classic tusche wash techniques, which is completed in 1973. (35mm/16mm color, sound, 28 minutes) In 1974, receives Oscar nomination from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Documentary Division, for Four Stones for Kanemitsu, which is also awarded the Golden Eagle, Cine.
1970 The Ford Foundation grants $705,000 to fund the transformation of Tamarind Lithography workshop into the Tamarind Institute of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Transfers assets of Tamarind Lithography Workshop to the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico with Clinton Adams as Director. Establishes a commercial press, Tamstone, after Tamarind moved to the University of New Mexico. Continued to work with master printer Serge Lozingot. The first print is Hung Jury (State 1), Thou Shalt Not (State II) andStandoff (State III), published in October 1970. Creates two new lithographic series: Burning Helix on the genetic code and Tidal Waves as metaphors of destructive force.
1970 - 75 Advised by Madeleine Jarry of the Manufactory des Gobelins, Wayne prepares tapestry cartoons and travels to France to work with three different weavers: Pierre Daquin, Giselle Brivet and Camille Legoueix. The completed tapestries are exhibited in context with lithographs and drawings in museums and galleries throughout California beginning in 1973 and in nine museums in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland during 1975 - 76.
1972 Writes and hosts an eight-part television series, June Wayne with Francoise Gilot, Louise Nevelson, May Natalie Tabak, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Grace Glueck, Barbaralee Diamondstein, Lorser Feitelson, Charles White and Ann McCoy. Produced by Price Hicks for KCET/PBS, Los Angeles. Creates "Joan of Art Seminar," a series of 10 professional training seminars for and about the problems of women artists, encouraging each participant to mentor other women. Subject of half-hour television program, The Lively Arts, hosted by James Hanschumacher and produced by James Malthus for CBS.
1973 First of many invited keynote lectures entitled "Male Artist as Stereotypical Female" (College Art Association), which establishes Wayne as important thinker and voice in the arts.
1974 Edward Hamilton, Tamarind trained master printer, becomes Wayne's personal printer until 1989. Begins a remarkable body of work on astrophysical space. Wayne said space was to her "what the Rockies of the American West were to Albert Bierstadt." (Unpublished manuscript for Distinguished Lecture Series, California State University, Fresno, April 26, 1988).
1976 Received first of six Doctor of Fine Arts, Honoris Causis from International College, Los Angeles and London; The Atlanta College of Fine Arts, Atlanta, GA (1988); California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco, CA (1988); Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA (1991); Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI (1994) and Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (2005).
1975 - 79 Creates The Dorothy Series, a moving tribute to her mother. As a memorial to an otherwise anonymous twentieth-century workingwoman, its feminist concerns ensured its popular appeal when it appeared. Twenty "freeze frames," symbolically color-coded, refer to the predicament of women and encapsulate her mother's life. A solo exhibition featuring the series travels in 1983 to 12 museums in California, Nevada, Texas, Alabama, Iowa and New York and in 1995 to the Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and in Los Angeles to The Skirball Museum.
1979 Once a Daughter, documentary film produced by Lynn Littman, with a segment featuring June Wayne and the making of The Dorothy Series. Also featured in the film were Robin and June's 2 grandchildren, Ariane and Jevon.
1981 - 83 Writes, produces, directs and narrates, The Dorothy Series by June Wayne, which is presented on KCET/ PBS. Appears in About The Dorothy Series, program for KCET/PBS produced by Price Hicks and directed by Bruce Franchise. Creates the Cognitos paintings, My Palomar series, Solar Flares series, and Sagh series.
1984 Makes her live stage debut as "Fat Anxiety" in Pablo Picasso's Catch Desire by the Tail (1941), staged at the Guggenheim Museum, New York on 26 and 27 October; other actors are Louise Bourgeois, Francoise Gilot, David Hockney and Red Grooms.
1988 Catalyses a nationwide campaign that results in tax proposals, damaging to artists, being abandoned. Collaborates with Otto Piene and the MIT Institute for Advanced Visual Studies in Sky Work, projecting her galactic images onto a 20-foot balloon sphere. Flies in a parachute harness suspended from 12 Piene balloons during the Westweek celebration at the Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood,CA.
1989 Travels to Australia, Japan and France. Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris acquires some 250 prints.
1990 Attacks censorship and the threat to the National Endowment for the Arts in "Obscenity Reconsidered," an address to the annual meeting of the College Art Association at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
1991 Receives International Women's Forum Award: Women Who Made a Difference, Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.
1997 Major retrospective, June Wayne: A Retrospective, organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, Purchase. Exhibit travels to Los Angeles County Art Museum and Palm Springs Museum of Art.
1997 - 98 "A World of Art: Works in Progress June Wayne," Annenburg/CPB Project grant to Henry Sayre, Oregon State University in cooperation with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Directed by Marlo Bendau. Daughter Robin remarries Bob Park who then was employed by The Neilsen Ratings and heavily involved in web site development. So began JuneWayne.com.
1999 Returns to Paris for the celebration of the bicentennial of lithography and is featured in a major exhibition organized by the Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris in collaboration with the Bibliotheque nationale de France. In the catalogue of the exhibition, renowned French print curator Jorge de Sousa highlighted the work of only two artists representing printmaking in the 20th Century: Pablo Picasso and June Wayne, saying Wayne was "the incontestable pioneer of contemporary lithography."
2002 Gives a substantial collection (2500 items) of her graphics as well as graphic works by other artists to the Center for Innovative Print and Paper at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Named Professor of Research in Printmaking and Paper, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
2003 Husband, Hank Plone dies on January 7. Solo exhibition, June Wayne: Selected Graphics 1950-2000, Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. Begins two years of taped interviews with Robert Conway in preparation for a catalogue raisonne. Honored by The College Art Association at the Eighth annual Recognition Awards Ceremony, American folk Art Museum, New York.
2005 Video interview by Stacy Keach and Gary Greenberg, 27 February for their television series on science and art. Work featured in group exhibition, Paths to the Press: Printmaking and American Women Artists, 1910-1960, Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS.
2006 June Wayne, The Art Of Everything: A Catalogue Raisonne 1936-2006 with essays by Robert P. Conway and Arthur C. Danto, published by Rutgers University Press. Solo exhibition, June Wayne, Pioneer Lithographer, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England. Participated in group exhibition and symposium, Eighteen Profiles: Distinguished Women Artists of California, Fresno Art Museum. Completes Sects in the City project, first political artwork.
2007 Received the Henry Hopkins Award from Artscene, for the artist who most influenced the Los Angeles art world over the last 25 years.
2007 - 08 Work featured in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., and Vancouver Art Gallery.
2008 Exhibition and symposium honoring the 50th anniversary of the publication of John Donne's Songs and Sonets, UCLA Department of Special Collections. Receives Artistic License Award from the California Lawyers for the Arts. National Women's History Month Honoree.
2009 Receives Vision Award for Artistic Innovation, USC Roski School of Fine Arts Award, in conjunction with exhibition of Stellar Winds suite. Work featured in group exhibition, "Reflections / Refractions: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century," from The Ruth Bowman and Harry Kahn Twentieth-Century American Self-Portrait Collection, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
2009 and 2010 Received Lee Krasner Awards, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, in recognition of a long and distinguished career as one of America's foremost artists.
2010 Recipient of the Hollywood Charlie Award. Solo exhibition of "The Dorothy Series" at Woman's Museum Washington D.C.
2010 - 11 Solo exhibition, "June Wayne's Narrative Tapestries: Tidal Waves, DNA and The Cosmos," at The Art Institute of Chicago.