June Wayne Study Center and Archive
at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper

June Wayne, renowned California artist and founder of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, has donated a substantial collection of her own art work and the work of 128 other distinguished artists -- over 3,300 prints valued at nearly $5.5 million -- to the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (RCIPP) at Mason Gross School of the Arts, establishing the June Wayne Study Center and Archive.

Among the artists represented in the collection are Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert DeNiro (father of the actor), Francoise Gilot, Elaine de Kooning, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Louise Nevelson, David Hare, Richard Haas, Robert Motherwell, Jose Luis Cuevas, and Magda Abakanowicz. They represent painters and sculptors as well as printmakers, who either created works with Wayne or whose works reflect the techniques and qualities she helped preserve and perfect.

Wayne also has accepted an appointment as a research professor at RCIPP that will bring her to the New Brunswick campus each year to lecture, interact with students and create new work in tandem with the center's professional staff of printers, typographers and papermakers.

About June Wayne and the Tamarind Workshop

In nearly 70 years as an artist, June Wayne has achieved legendary status for her multiple talents in areas ranging from art to film, and for her visionary leadership and activism on behalf of artists. But her greatest fame stems from her work in and influence on printmaking and fine-art lithography. In a book issued in France upon the 200th anniversary of lithography, La Memoire Lithographique, the author, art historian and print curator Jorge de Sousa highlighted just two artists representing 20th-century printmaking: Wayne and Picasso. He called Wayne "the incontestable pioneer of contemporary lithography."

Since her first solo exhibition at age 17 in Chicago in 1935, Wayne has boldly explored a variety of media and aesthetic concepts. She was creating "optical art" long before it had a name and adapting Ben Day dots in her work decades ahead of Pop Art. She has bridged art and science with her 1970 series on the genetic code and through her explorations of molecular biology and quantum mechanics. Also a writer and producer, she was nominated for an Oscar in 1974 for Four Stones for Kanemitsu, regarded as the leading documentary on the art of lithography.

In 1959, with funding assistance from the Ford Foundation, Wayne established the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles and set about refining and improving the way lithographs were made, with the goal of strengthening lithography in the United States. In the process, she revived an art that was nearly extinct in this country; prior to the establishment of Tamarind, Wayne had to travel to Paris to have her work printed, being unable to find a fine art lithographer in the United States to with whom to collaborate. Tamarind artists working with Tamarind-trained printers created nearly 3,000 lithographs. In 1970, the workshop became the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico, where it still resides.

Wayne also has given artists a voice through her activism, which dates to 1939, when she and other artists petitioned the federal government to continue the WPA's (Works Progress Administration) art projects. In the 1950s, she took on McCarthyism, and in the 1970s, she was a leader in the American women's movement in art. In 1990, she was a vocal advocate of government support for the endangered National Endowment for the Arts. Now 84, Wayne continues to live and work on the Los Angeles street that gave her lithography workshop its name. For more information on June Wayne and her art, visit her site.

Francois Gilot At the Circus (1975)	June Wayne The Target (1951)	Louise Nevelson Not Titled (1978)	June Wayne Weighed and Wanting (1970)