A 2019 data survey of the permanent collections of 18 prominent art museums in the U.S. found that out of over 10,000 artists, a mere 13% are female. The ASU Art Museum is at the forefront of an effort to shift that number and boost the recognition accorded women artists. Two shows this past year, in particular, shone a spotlight on works by women in the museum’s extensive permanent collection: “Change Agent: June Wayne and the Tamarind Workshop” and “Clayblazers: Women Artists of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.”

“Both of these exhibitions, drawn from the strength of the ASU Art Museum’s permanent collection, highlight the underrecognized contributions of women to art of the 20th century,” said ASU Art Museum Director Miki Garcia. “Our curators have pulled together works by important artists to be recognized among their peers – an important and overdue correction to the canon.”

June Wayne was a significant American artist in her own right who devoted her attention to ensuring the resuscitation and survival of lithography, which is the process of printing from a flat surface — usually stone or metal — treated so as to repel the ink except where it is required for printing. In 1960, when Wayne secured a Ford Foundation grant to establish Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, lithography was on the verge of extinction in the U.S. Wayne compared artist-lithographers to the great white whooping crane, in need of “a protected environment and a concerned public so that, once rescued from extinction they could make a go of it on their own.”

“When June got started, the attitude was ‘real artists don’t make prints,’ ” said Marjorie Devon, director of what is now the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, in a 2006 interview with The Los Angeles Times. “It’s a testimony to her persuasiveness that she got top artists interested.” The experimental workshop created a pool of printers and apprentices, as artists from across the country were invited to master the process of lithography. Today the Tamarind Institute, part of the University of New Mexico, continues Wayne’s visionary plan as a major training center for fine art printers.

Along with prints by Wayne, “Change Agent” also featured lithographs by internationally-known artists who trained at Tamarind such as Ed Ruscha, Matsumi Kanemitsu and Fritz Scholder. All of the works in the exhibition were drawn from the ASU Art Museum’s Jules Heller Print Study Room, which houses a collection of 6,000 prints from throughout history and around the world.

ASU Art Museum curator Brittany Corrales, who organized the exhibition from the museum’s print collection, said that while Wayne is known today for shaping the culture of American printmaking, she is underrecognized for her own artistic practice.

“This may be because her work doesn’t fit into neat boxes,” Corrales said. “She pushed back against the pressures of the art market, constantly re-defining the scope of her work, experimenting with media, process and content. Wayne was also unafraid to ask big questions; her interpretations of modern science show her grappling with the cosmos and our place in the universe.”

Wayne refused to follow a signature style, taking on a variety of themes such as personal history, modern science and social issues. In the Stellar Winds and Solar Flares Series, she mines natural phenomena as metaphors for the human condition. And in the Dorothy Series, she narrates the life of her mother, a Russian Jewish immigrant and traveling saleswoman for a garter company.

“Wayne’s impact as a pioneer of the feminist art movement and a teacher of women cannot be overstated,” Corrales said. “Her Dorothy Series feels newly relevant and provides important context for today’s women’s rights activism.”

Image credit: June Wayne, “Secretary to a Publisher (Plate 6 of the Dorothy Series),” 1976, lithograph, 17 x 1/4 x21 1/2 inches, Gift of Dr.and Mrs. Malcolm Dorfman.
Clayblazers photo by Craig Smith