La Journée des Lemmings
Lemmings’ Day
June Wayne
Tapestry
96 x 132 in. (243,8 x 335,3 cm)
Tapestry, two examples woven by Pierre Daquin, Atelier de Saint Cyr.
1971
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Fullerton Museum Center, 2024; MB Abram Galleries, 2018; Pasadena Museum of California Art, 2014; David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, 2013; Art Institute of Chicago, 2010; Mason Gross School of the Arts Gallery, 2005; Neuberger Museum of Art, 1997; National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1994; Fresno Art Museum, 1988; Macalaster College, 1986; Pomona College, 1978; Franco-American Institute, 1978; Van Doren Gallery, 1976; Galerie La Demeure, 1974; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 1973.
COMMENTS
In 1962 scientist Rachel Carson had sounded the alarm in Silent Spring as to the dangers of the use of DDT to the environment. Such concerns crystalized in Earth Day in 1970. Wayne had similarly been intuiting ecological and global changes for many years. In 1968 she created the lithograph Lemming’s Day, a work of ominous foreboding. She revisited this image in the monumental and complex tapestry woven in France under her direction La Journée Des Lemmings, 1971.
“La Journée des Lemmings, more than ten feet wide, is a sumptuously textured abstraction in intricately woven wool. Its fractured, black and white storm clouds visually coalesce into layers of geological strata, like an X-ray of underground sedimentary rock. Across a dark, compressed band in the lower right quadrant, tiny naked figures swarm. Humanity’s chaos evokes the social turmoil of the day—Vietnam horrors, the fallout of stalled Paris peace talks, the senseless bombing of Cambodia, the slaughter of students at Kent State and more.”
— Christopher Knight, A survey of June Wayne at Pasadena Museum of California Art, Los Angeles Times, 2014.
“This tapestry presents a primordial landscape, populated with human shapes sometimes difficult to recognize. Although a lemming is a herbivorous, nonhibernating rodent that burrows through the roughest of Arctic and sub-Arctic soils, in this tapestry the title is applied to the humanized lemmings and takes advantage of the popular misconception that these creatures commit mass suicide by throwing themselves over high cliffs in large numbers. One sees in this tapestry tremendous turmoil, rapid movement and apparent struggle, which easily describe a mass suicide, leaving the viewer haunted by Wayne’s devastating portrayal of chaos in black and white.”
—Christa C. Mayer Thurman, Curator June Wayne’s Narrative Tapestries: Tidal Waves, DNA, and the Cosmos, Exhibition Catalogue, Art Institute of Chicago, 2010.
“In ‘Lemming’s Day’ Wayne manipulates black with white almost equally to evoke the threatening flood-drenched, windswept primordial terrain that reaches beyond the tapestry borders. Within the catastrophic movement emphatically expressed, numbers of generalized figure forms are compelled to tumble headlong across a harsh and mottled plane toward the abyss, providing a stark narrative component that is told with accelerating speed.”
—Curator Bernard Kester, as quoted in June Wayne—The Art of Everything by Robert P. Conway, 2007.
“Lemmings are known for their recurrent mass migrations. The blind suicide of whole societies of the short-tailed furry rodents occurs at the end of such pilgrimages—often to the sea at night, where vast numbers drown by jumping off cliffs into fjords. Wayne suggests that lemmings, like people, when choosing a leader, “merely elect someone who doesn’t know the way.”
—Arlene Raven, Curator June Wayne, A Retrospective, Neuberger Museum of Art, 1997. June Wayne quote from Mary Baskett The Art of June Wayne.
Please also see the lithographs Lemmings’ Day and Lemmings’ Night.
June Wayne, Tapestry, La Journée des Lemmings