June Leaf, accomplished artist and longtime Mabou resident, remembered by friends and colleagues

June Leaf, a world-renowned artist who divided her time between New York City and Cape Breton Island, has died at 94.

Her passing marks the end of an era that saw two of the world’s great artists put down stakes in Mabou, N.S., and build an alternative life there away from their other home on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. 

Leaf and her husband, the late photographer Robert Frank, known for his famous book The Americans, moved to Cape Breton after purchasing a house perched atop a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in 1970. 

Though sometimes overshadowed by her more famous husband, Leaf was a significant artist in her own right, completing countless paintings, drawings and sculptures over the course of seven decades, working with a variety of materials, including paint, wire and metal, and exhibiting her work internationally, most recently in a major survey of her drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 2016.

But it was a 2022 exhibition at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts that brought her life in Mabou and the people she met there into sharper focus. 

The exhibition, titled June Leaf in Mabou since 1979, showcased a selection of the work Leaf had made there over the years, little of which had been shown before, including a series of portraits of residents she began following the death of Frank’s daughter Andrea in a 1974 plane crash.

Andrea had loved Cape Breton and in a short time had become very close to many of the residents. 

Sketching them was Leaf’s way of honouring Andrea, said Emily Falencki, the curator of the exhibition, who worked closely with Leaf to assemble the show. 

“June’s project started because she wanted to draw and paint every person that had met Andrea,” she said. “And then it just became a bigger project and she started to paint and draw pretty much everybody that she knew here.” 

Not unlike a photograph, each drawing documented a precise moment in time, making it all the more moving when the people whose likeness Leaf captured — and who had aged many years in the interim — got to view the work again at the exhibition.

“It was so extraordinary,” said Falencki. “She kept saying, ‘It’s as if the people are walking in and out of the drawings,’ because it was all the same folks, except for 30 or 40 years later.” 

Unassuming but fierce 

Sarah Rankin grew up next door to Leaf and Frank but never thought much of it, although there were signs that the couple were famous. 

Knocks on her family’s door asking if it would be OK to bother the neighbours, for instance, weren’t uncommon. 

But the couple’s home was modest and both artists unpretentious. 

They were so unassuming, in fact, that when Rankin was still a girl, she didn’t think anything of it when she went over one day with her mother to ask for some help.

The family cat had just had kittens, and they needed someone with a camera to take pictures of the litter to share them on a community bulletin board. 

“I think Robert took them, which is funny, because we didn’t understand how famous he was, but we knew he had a camera,” laughed Rankin. 

While Leaf was a fixture in the community, she couldn’t help but stand out, said Rankin.

She was struck by Leaf’s aura from the beginning, including her sharp and intense green eyes, and wild and untamed hair.

“The ladies around her age were very prim and proper and their hair was very neat and hers was like this wild mane,” she said.

Leaf had a studio on her property and as recently as last summer could be seen working away inside, tending to her projects in the way that only someone who has a lifetime command of her craft can. 

“She’d always have classical music in the background while she worked. She’d take a break and she’d dance and then she would talk and tell herself what she’d do next,” said Rankin, an artist herself. 

“It was really cool to see, like performance art … she was alone doing this, in her own world.”

Falencki echoed that statement, describing Leaf as a master of her craft.

“It was magnificent. It was like nothing else. She was so strong and so focused,” she said. “She would bend metal one minute and torch it the next and be in her foundry, and be making a painting the next, and be carving something the next, and it was like that till the very, very end of her life.” 

Mabou exhibition made an impact

Getting to showcase her work in 2022 and celebrate her many years in Mabou was filled with meaning for Leaf. 

“It’s quite a wonderful experience, for a person from a big city to have had to adjust to a rural community,” she told The New York Times shortly after the exhibit opened. 

“I knew they had an impact on Robert and me, but I didn’t realize what an impact we had on them.”

Though both Leaf and Frank are now gone, their impact on the island can’t be denied.

According to the Inverness Oran, the couple previously made several charitable contributions to Inverness Consolidated Memorial Hospital, which led to the purchase of new digital imaging equipment and the creation of an accessible washroom.

But the most visible example of their legacy is the home and studio where they lived and worked in Mabou.

It’s unclear what will happen to the property now, said Rankin, but if she looks next door, she can still see Leaf’s studio just as she left it — with everything in its right place. 

“It hasn’t been touched,” she said.