June Claire Wayne, painter, printmaker and administrator, was born in Chicago in 1918. She was primarily self-taught as an artist and, at age 18, had her first major exhibition at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. In 1939, Wayne moved to New York where she worked in the garment industry. With World War II underway, she traveled to California where she studied technical drawing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. After a brief return to Chicago where she worked in the WPA program and wrote for a radio station, she relocated permanently to Los Angeles in 1946. Wayne attended Lynton Kistler’s workshops on fine printing and worked in his studio on numerous occasions.
Dissatisfied because the workshop could not meet her creative demands, she went to Paris in 1957 to work with Marcel Durassier. Working with master printers and fine paper made it apparent that a comparable workshop was needed in the United States. She consulted with Clinton Adams in 1959 and, with grants from the Ford Foundation, the Tamarind Lithography Workshop was founded in Los Angeles in 1960. Adams served as the founding associate director and Wayne served as its director for a decade.
Wayne’s legacy is the Tamarind Institute and she is insured a niche in the history of lithography. She has been honored with numerous accolades and her affiliations include the National Association of Women Artists, Society of American Graphic Artists, Philadelphia Print Club, Los Angeles Art Association, and the Society of Washington Printmakers. Her work is represented in numerous collections of which a few are the Library of Congress, Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, Bibliotheque Nationale, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Museum of Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art.
June Wayne died at her home in Los Angeles on August 23, 2011.
