Since her first solo exhibition in 1935 at the age of seventeen, June Wayne has achieved legendary status among twentieth-century American artists. Best known today for her work in and influence on printmaking and fine-art lithography, one of her most renowned achievements was the founding of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1959. Under her direction, this workshop became one of the most important focal points of a general revival of printmaking in the United States - a revival that gave many other famous artists, including Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, and Ed Ruscha, an opportunity to experiment in this format. Her own spectacular prints earned her the estimable title the incontestable pioneer of contemporary lithography. But Wayne's artistic accomplishments are even richer than that. Throughout her career, she boldly explored a variety of media and aesthetic concepts.
This major retrospective was organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art and the State University of New York, Purchase. This catalog includes notes by Arlene Raven, an exhibition checklist of 119 works (mostly lithographs and some paintings), detailed illustrated chronology, lengthy bibliography, and an index.
This timely reexamination of the experimental New York print studio Atelier 17 focuses on the women whose work defied gender norms through novel aesthetic forms and techniques.
In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city's physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were ineffective and even destructive to community needs. In confronting issues like housing shortages, blight in older areas, and changing economic conditions, Detroit's city planners worked during the urban renewal era without much consideration for low-income and African American residents, and their efforts to stabilize racially mixed neighborhoods faltered as well. Steady declines in industrial prowess and the constant decentralization of white residents counteracted planners' efforts to rebuild the city. Among the issues Thomas discusses in this volume are the harmful impacts of Detroit's highways, the mixed record of urban renewal projects like Lafayette Park, the effects of the 1967 riots on Detroit's ability to plan, the city-building strategies of Coleman Young (the city's first black mayor) and his mayoral successors, and the evolution of Detroit's federally designated Empowerment Zone. Examining the city she knew first as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University and later as a scholar and planner, Thomas ultimately argues for a different approach to traditional planning that places social justice, equity, and community ahead of purely physical and economic objectives. Redevelopment and Race was originally published in 1997 and was given the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1999. Students and teachers of urban planning will be grateful for this re-release. A new postscript offers insights into changes since 1997.
