June Leaf’s Bleecker Street studio remembered amid new exhibitions
Writer Robert Sullivan reflects on the late sculptor June Leaf and the Bleecker Street building where she lived and worked with photographer Robert Frank. Leaf’s work is included in 'The Bowery: Devil's Mile' at New York’s New Museum, and a solo exhibition in Los Angeles is planned for 2027. The couple first rented a room in the late 1970s and later bought the 1817 Federal-style property.
Leaf, a Chicago-born sculptor, trained briefly at the New Bauhaus and later studied in Paris on a Fulbright before settling in New York in 1960, where she taught painting at Parsons. She and photographer Robert Frank began renting a room on Bleecker Street in the late 1970s for $48 and eventually purchased the 1817 Federal-style building.
The property had served as a private home and later housed furriers, a Chinese laundry, and a stationery shop. Leaf’s one-room studio, a former shopfront slightly above street level, included an elevated platform and sheer curtains used for staging work. Frank died in 2019 at 94.
The renewed attention may draw visitors, artists, and historians to Leaf’s legacy and to the history of artist live-work spaces in New York. Exhibitions could encourage broader public interest in overlooked women sculptors and in how creative neighborhoods change over time. For local residents and cultural institutions, the story may also prompt reflection on preserving ordinary buildings that carry artistic memory, though its direct impact is likely modest and gradual.