At the age of about three, the artist June Leaf was sitting under a sewing table, watching her mother’s feet on the treadle. Her mother had given her a piece of gauzy blue dotted swiss fabric that seemed to be “the starry night,” and she wrapped herself in it. Then she decided to draw her mother’s shoe. Dissatisfied with the result, she asked her mother to try: “I remember thinking, it’s wrong. She doesn’t care how the toe goes on the ground. I care.” In this moment, Leaf knew she wanted to work with her hands. “I feel my fingers have eyes,” she explained in an interview. “I don’t see anything until I touch [it]. And then all of a sudden, my fingers see—they see.” *

Leaf, who died in 2024 at age ninety-four, made paintings, sculptures, drawings, and collages. For her, one form fed another—none was primary. “I act like [carving is] painting,” she once told the artist Joan Jonas.…