Choker

June Wayne, Burning Helix Series
8 x 28 in. (20,3 x 71,1 cm)
Lithograph printed by Serge Lozingot,
assisted by William Law III, on Rives BFK
Edition of 35, 1970.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Neuberger Museum of Art, 1997; Van Doren Gallery, 1974; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 1973; Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer, 1972; Phone Associates and Grunwald Foundation, 1970-1.

SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Brodsky Center, Grunwald Center.

COMMENTS
June Wayne was a close friend of painter Françoise Gilot, author of “Life with Picasso” (1964), and mother of his children. Gilot was a fellow at Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Scientist Jonas Salk, Gilot’s husband, and inventor of the polio vaccine, also became a good friend of Wayne..

In 1970 Wayne visited Salk at his namesake Institute in La Jolla, where he shared with her a slide of a bacterium DNA. “It looked like a necklace, not a very pretty one, but nonetheless like a piece of jewelry. So I used that here and many other times.”

The lithograph “Choker” (September 1970) references her earlier work “Lemmings”. Suspended from each DNA bead, like a charm from a necklace, is a human figure, a lemming under a white sky against black cliffs.
—Robert P. Conway, “June Wayne - The Art Of Everything”