June Edmonds is an American painter and public artist based in Los Angeles.Knight, Christopher. "Review: A welcome June Edmonds survey illuminates the artist’s surprising trajectory," Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2021. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Mackin-Solomon, Ashley. "New installation for Murals of La Jolla honors local Black pioneers," The San Diego Union-Tribune, July 12, 2021. Retrieved November 7, 2024. She is best known for patterned, thickly textured abstract paintings—most notably, her "Energy Wheel Paintings" and "Flag Paintings"—which express the social, psychological and historical complexity of Black experience.Valentine, Victoria. "On View: See Images From 'June Edmonds: Full Spectrum,' a 40-Year Survey at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles," Culture Type, November 8, 2021. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Pagel, David. "June Edmonds Paints A Different American Flag – One Defiantly More Brown," Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2019. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Dambrot, Shana Nys. "June Edmonds at Luis De Jesus," Art and Cake, June 13, 2019. Retrieved November 6, 2024. These tactile, process-oriented works employ color, shape, repetition and movement to explore themes and historic narratives involving spiritual contemplation and growth, racial and gender identity, nationality and trauma.May, Richard Allen. "June Edmonds: Freedom in Abstraction," Artillery, November 2, 2021. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Barrie, Lita. "June Edmond’s 40-Year Survey at Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University and Solo Exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles," Whitehot Magazine, October 30, 2021. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Conner, Allison. "The Whirling, Spiritual Abstraction of June Edmonds," Hyperallergic, December. 7, 2021. Retrieved November 6, 2024. Reviewers have likened them to sacred forms of art—the dot-paintings of Aboriginal Australians, mandalas and African textiles—as well as to architecture, music and the work of artists Alma Thomas, Joan Mitchell and Alfred Jensen, among others.Heitzman, Lorraine. “Polychromatic Mojo: Color as Content, Cerritos College Art Gallery," Art and Cake, November 11, 2018. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Harvey, Doug. "June Edmonds: Circle/Curve Series," Abstract Spiritual, April 2016.Knight, Christopher. "'Hard Edged' art at California African American Museum widens perception of black artists' work," Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2015. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Haight, Cathryn. "5 Museum Curators Share The Artwork They’ve Missed The Most," WBUR, July 15, 2020. Retrieved November 7, 2024. Curator Jill Moniz describes Edmonds's artistic practice as offering a "language steeped in spiritual resonance, collective consciousness and cultural memory," fusing "painterly knowledge" with personal and social experience.Moniz, Jill. "Chasing Rapture," in June Edmonds: Full Spectrum, Jill Moniz and Karen Rapp, Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University, 2021. Retrieved November 7, 2024.
Edmonds has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the AWARE Prize, and City of Los Angeles (COLA) and California Community Foundation fellowships.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. June Edmonds, Fellows. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Ludel, Wallace. "June Edmonds wins inaugural $10,000 Aware Prize for women artists at the Armory Show," The Art Newspaper, March 5, 2020. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Easter, Makeda. "L.A. gave local artists $10,000 grants. See what they did with them at Barnsdall Art Park," Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2018. Retrieved November 6, 2024. She has completed public artwork commissions for CaltechEhlert, Julia. "Caltech Unveils Portrait of Grant D. Venerable (BS '32)," Caltech, June 18, 2024. Retrieved November 7, 2024. and the cities of Inglewood, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Pasadena, as well as created a mural with Murals of La Jolla.Inglewood Public Art. "Inglewood Genesis," Projects. Retrieved November 7, 2024.Dunitz, Robin. "L.A.'s Newest Murals Column," Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, 2001. Retrieved November 7, 2024. Her art belongs to the permanent collections of the Crocker Art Museum,Rapp, Karen. June Edmonds: Full Spectrum, with Jill Moniz, Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University, 2021. Retrieved November 7, 2024. California African American Museum,California African American Museum. "Recent Acquisitions – Curatorial Selections," Exhibitions, 2014. Retrieved November 6, 2024. Davis Museum,Davis Museum. Friends of Art Acquisitions, 2019 Year in Review. Retrieved November 6, 2024. and Mead Art Museum, among others.Mead Art Museum. Mead Art Museum Annual Report 2020–21, Amherst, MA: Mead Art Museum, 2021, p. 3, 24, 32, 43.
Early life and career June Edmonds was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the city's Crenshaw district.Segal, Edward. "Valley Professor June Edmonds named Guggenheim Fellow," The Valley Star, May 19, 2022. Retrieved November 7, 2024.Los Angeles Times. "June Edmonds at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles," March 7, 2024. Retrieved November 6, 2024.Riverside Art Museum. June Edmonds: Rhythmic Inquisitions, Exhibitions. Retrieved November 6, 2024. Her mother, a teacher, enjoyed drawing and took her on formative visits to museum exhibitions; in her late teens she was influenced by the seminal LACMA exhibition, "Two Centuries of Black American Art." Edmonds completed BA and MFA degrees at San Diego State University and Tyler School of Art respectively, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Her figurative, mise-en-scène paintings of the 1980s captured young African-American life in casual moments of women playing board games or hanging out in settings filled with lively African textiles, carpets and clothing (e.g., Contrast I, 1990).Stromberg, Matt and Elisa Wouk Almino. "Your Concise Los Angeles Art Guide for October 2021," Hyperallergic, October 1, 2021. Retrieved November 7, 2024. Painted with a confident embrace of color and texture, the images recalled the expressive figuration of artists such as Varnette Honeywood, Charles W. White, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, David Hockney and Matisse, whose work also embraced an abstract taste for color and pattern.Woodard, Josef. "Exhibit Gives Form to the Inner Visions of L.A.’s Diverse Art World," Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1997. Retrieved November 7, 2024.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of Edmonds's work centered on public art commissions in the Los Angeles area.Paterno, Susan. "'Spacey' Art Graces a Public Place," Los Angeles Times, September 27, 1992. Retrieved November 7, 2024.Sciaudone, Christiana. "Teens Tell Stories of Their Families' Arrivals in U.S.," Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2004. Retrieved November 6, 2024. She was influenced in this direction after learning about and meeting public artists of color such as Willie Middlebrook, Sandra Rowe, Richard Wyatt Jr., John Outterbridge and Elliott Pinkney at an exhibition of work created for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA).
Public art projects In 1995, Edmonds created a dozen circular Venetian glass mosaics depicting diverse local residents for a Long Beach metro station, becoming the second Black woman to be awarded an LACMTA commission.Snow, Shauna. "Rail Art," Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1992. Retrieved November 7, 2024. She produced several mosaics for recreation and community service centers subsequently, including: Why the Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky (1999), a series inspired by an ancient West African story explaining the presence of cosmological bodies; Inglewood Genesis (2000/2013), a tile mural that local students largely fabricated based their own drawings; and Portrait of Our Community (2005), a 30-foot figurative work at the Los Angeles Child Guidance Center. She also designed two large-scale wrought-iron works of linear, swirling patterns in 2001 and 2003.
Edmonds completed Ebony on Draper and Girard in 2021, a colorful, abstract mural in La Jolla that honored pioneering Black women in the city's development; based on the curved routes of old, area street maps, its undulating lines formed a leaf shape evoking feminine energy and interwoven layers of race, politics and identity.Evans, Julia Dixon. "5 Works of Art to See in San Diego in August," KPBS, August 10, 2021. Retrieved November 7, 2024. She temporarily returned to figuration in 2024 for a portrait commissioned by Caltech's Venerable House to honor the school's first Black undergraduate, Grant D. Venerable. It features two images of him—as a 1932 graduate and as an elder figure—set against biographical icons from his life she discovered through research.
Abstract painting, 2007–present Critics note that Edmond's artistic trajectory from representational to abstract imagery runs opposite to that of many other successful contemporary African-America artists. In discussions of her work, Edmonds has highlighted a tension within Black art since the Harlem Renaissance between the need for Black self-representation in a white-dominated society and the freedom to explore other artistic avenues, taken by artists such as Alma Thomas, Beauford Delaney and Norman Lewis.Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. "June Edmonds – Russell Lecture," October 27, 2021 Retrieved November 6, 2024.May, Richard Allen. "Gallery Rounds: June Edmonds," Artillery, October 26, 2022. Retrieved November 6, 2024. In 2021, critic Lita Barrie observed, "By making figurative paintings in the 1980s when figuration was out of fashion, and pursuing abstraction just when Black figuration is taking the art world by storm, Edmonds continues to defy dominant trends in order to pursue her personal process of discovery based on close observation."
Barrie and others suggest that Edmonds's visual language has developed through personal reflection and careful consideration of social and political life, artistic heritage, and significant, often neglected events and figures in Black history.Hudson, Suzanne. "Critics' Pick: June Edmonds," Artforum, May 24, 2019. Retrieved November 6, 2024. Her paintings explore themes of presence, growth and resilience on a spiritual and cultural level, weaving and layering associations through formal means, as well as through allusions in their titles.Victor, Lila. "Black in Mayberry Showcases FREEDOM: Celebrating the Art and Voices of Black Artists, Feature 3," Westside Current, July 22, 2024. Retrieved November 7, 2024. Shana Nys Dambrot describes Edmonds's approach as that of "an abstract painter, a patient and precise wielder of a heavy brush, and a gifted colorist. Her signature style of architecturally placed, thick and juicy applications of pure color is a little like mosaic, a little like textile weave, a little like bird feathers."
"Energy Wheel" and related paintings