“June Leaf: Shooting From the Heart”
June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart Exhibition Review
Brooklyn Rail, October 15, 2025
by Andrew L. Shea
“The secret is not drawing but DANCE.” So declares a work in charcoal on paper by June Leaf included in her current retrospective at NYU’s Grey Art Museum. Titled Drawings in Movement (2020), the piece depicts a circular stage where tiny, naked figures alternately recline, loll, lurch, and sprawl. Though Leaf (1929–2024) made drawings, sculptures, and paintings throughout her eight-decade career, she once wrote that “I’m really a choreographer.” Drawings in Movement only says aloud what the rest of this show makes implicitly obvious: that the movement of human bodies through space lies at the core of Leaf’s project.