SHFAP presents Drawings by June Leaf and Kyle Staver, a dialogue in line, watercolor and mixed media made on 8 ½ by 11 inch sheets. This exhibition is the most recent in a series of visual conversations between artists at the gallery. 

Now in her 90s, June Leaf is naturally prolific, working continually between sculpture, painting and drawing. Leaf’s visual world is populated by imagined and autobiographical figures who stride and dance across the page, sometimes animated by mysterious mechanical parts. These curious scenes are oddly human stagings of the play of passions that divide and attract us, with the artist as a kind of inventor and director, or as she terms herself, “a dancer… or an aviator.” Robert Berlind writes that Leaf’s pieces are “instances of exploring, pondering, and following often risky notions that are also details of the epic unfolding drama of making art. We are both inside and outside, absorbed by and witnessing the work’s creation… Once her work takes hold, and it does so immediately, we are enveloped.”

June Leaf grew up in Chicago, where she attended the New Bauhaus Institute of Design, and Roosevelt University in 1954. She moved to New York City in the early ‘60s. With her husband, the photographer Robert Frank, she split her time between their Bleecker Street studio and home in Nova Scotia. 

Leaf’s work is included in museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She exhibited recently at Frieze Masters, London (2022) and Ortuzar Projects, NYC (2022). She is included in an upcoming show at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University about post war Americans in Paris. Steven Harvey has shown Leaf’s work in a solo show and several group exhibitions. 

Kyle Staver’s scenes from world mythology, realized in pencil and mixed media on paper, have a rawness and physicality that evokes, as John Yau wrote, “the vision of someone who believes these figures exist as flesh, fur, feathers, and blood, rather than as symbols or allegorical representations.” Despite the comic element in her depictions, Staver gives her subjects and their stories empathy and gravitas. In her own words, she is “taking the universal and telling you about my stake in it…”

Staver was born and raised in Minnesota before attending Yale. She has shown at SHFAP several times, most recently in a 2021 show with Catherine White, and a two gallery solo exhibition in 2015. She has shown at Zurcher Gallery, NYC, the RX Gallery, Paris, as well as Half Gallery, NY and Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles. Most recently her work was exhibited at Nino Mier Gallery in Brussels, Belgium. Staver is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, both in 2015. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Design. Her work is included in the collections of the National Academy of Design, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Arts Club. 

Please contact Ella at the gallery at info@shfap.com or 917-861-7312 for further information or images.