Seminal Los Angeles printmaker June Wayne, 93, dies

Los Angeles artist June Wayne died Tuesday. She’s credited with helping revive printmaking and lithography in the United States.

By 1960 Wayne had been a jewelry and clothes designer, radio writer and accomplished painter who exhibited in Paris. That’s the year she founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop on Tamarind Avenue in East Hollywood. The workshop became an incubator for artists from around the country who wanted to learn the craft.

In an interview earlier this year, June Wayne said fine art has been largely inaccessible to all but the upper classes. She spent her life trying to change that by making multiple reproductions of fine art.

"I saw the arts as something that had to be embedded throughout our society," Wayne said.

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Wayne was 93 years old. She died of complications from cancer in her home on Tamarind Avenue.

The Norton Simon Museum had been working with her on a major exhibition of the Tamarind Workshop prints and her influence on the rise of printmaking in Southern California. The show is still scheduled to open on October 1.