June Edmonds

June Edmonds is an American painter and public artist based in Los Angeles. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Edmonds has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the AWARE Prize, and City of Los Angeles (COLA) and California Community Foundation fellowships. She has completed public artwork commissions for Caltech and the cities of Inglewood, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Pasadena, as well as created a mural with Murals of La Jolla. California African American Museum, Davis Museum, and Mead Art Museum, among others.

Early life and career June Edmonds was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the city's Crenshaw district. 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." 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.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of Edmonds's work centered on public art commissions in the Los Angeles area. 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." Critic Genie Davis compared such paintings to "visual bursts of energy, kaleidoscopic, like cosmic flowers. These are circular forms that spin wildly, yet maintain perfect symmetry and control." In the painting Unina (2017),

"Flag Paintings" Edmonds's draped and stretched "Flag Paintings" (2018–present) were inspired by encounters with the confederate flag in the South and by U.S. electoral politics.

In Edmonds's exhibition "Allegiances and Convictions" (2019), each flag's title directly alluded to a figure or story from African-American history, such as the Fifth of July or civil rights activists Claudette Colvin and Mary Ann Shadd Cary (Shadd Cary Flag, 2020).

Recognition and exhibitions Edmonds has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, California Community Foundation (both 2022) and City of Los Angeles (COLA, 2018). She received grants from the Harpo Foundation, California Arts Council and Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. MacDowell, A.I.R. Studio Paducah, and Vermont Studio Center. California African American Museum, and Getty Villa, as well as at the Dakar Biennale (2022). She has had solo exhibitions at the Luis De Jesus Los Angeles Gallery (2019–24), and Galerie Lelong, New York, and surveys at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (2021) Columbus Museum of Art (Pizzuti Collection), Crocker Art Museum, Davis Museum, Mead Art Museum, and United States Department of State.