The Other Babel - from Burning Helix Series

June Claire Wayne

The "Burning Helix Series" was comprised of 20 lithographs (thirteen images in various states) based on the genetic code and the double helixes of RNA and DNA. Wayne commented about this image: "This is a reference back again to (Abraham) Kaplan's fable of the Tower of Babel, the 'other' Babel being the chattering babble of the genes. There is the crumpled paper cliff face, which you can read either as paper or as a landscape. It amused me that I was referring to a geological structure as well as to paper on which you write - two extremes of interpretation possible in the same thing."

June Claire Wayne, painter, printmaker, educator, and administrator, was born in Chicago, Illinois on 7 March 1918. She was primarily self-taught as an artist and had her first exhibition at the Boulevard Bookshop in Chicago in 1934 at age seventeen.

The following year her first major exhibition was mounted at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Wayne moved to New York City in 1939, where she worked in the garment industry, an endeavor that continued to inform her work throughout her career. With the advent of World War II, she traveled to California where she studied technical drawing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. After a brief return to Chicago where she worked in the WPA program and wrote for a radio station, she moved to Los Angeles in 1946.

In 1948, Wayne attended Lynton Kistler's lithography classes in Los Angeles, working in his studio on numerous occasions. Dissatisfied with the limitations of the workshop, Wayne traveled to Paris in 1957 to work with Marcel Durassier, hoping to find the encouragement to funnel her vision of experimental fine art lithography into a reality. Working with master printers and fine paper made it apparent that a comparable workshop was needed in the United States.

She consulted with artist Clinton Adams in 1959 and, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, the Tamarind Lithography Workshop was founded in Los Angeles in 1960. Adams served as the founding associate director and Wayne served as its director. After ten years of co-operating the workshop, she arranged to hand over the workshop to the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where it remains a magnet for artists from all over the world.