June Edmonds
June Edmonds
Inheritance II, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
74 x 50 in (188 x 127 cm)
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce June Edmonds: Inheritance, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, expanding her acclaimed Flag series. The exhibition runs from September 12 – October 24, 2026. An opening reception will be held Saturday, September 12, from 4–7 pm.
June Edmonds: Inheritance invites critical reflection on the relationship between memory, national identity, and collective responsibility. Contextualized within a moment when Black and Brown presence and histories are increasingly targeted for erasure, the exhibition is a direct call to confront the stains of American history and envision a more equitable future.
Inheritance revisits Edmonds' iconic Flag series, reimagining the American flag as a mutable symbol whose promises of freedom and belonging remain unevenly realized. While earlier iterations honored individual figures and events in Black American history, these new paintings address the broader systemic injustices shaping the lives of American citizens and immigrants. Rather than treating the emblem as a fixed national monument, Edmonds presents it as a contested site where idealized projections collide with lived contradictions. Through these individual works, the exhibition rejects a monolithic national ethos, inviting viewers to reconsider the flag's visual and social power through a liberatory lens.
In this body of work, Edmonds' Standing Flag compositions are disrupted by abstract stain formations that evoke blights, phantoms, topographies, or scars. These mucky marks serve as metaphors for unresolved histories and current events, emphasizing that the flag has never symbolized liberty or justice for all. Functioning as both a disruption and a revelation, the distortion draws attention to suppressed historical narratives, demanding the recognition and accountability required for meaningful change. By interrupting the flag's familiar patterns, Edmonds asserts that confronting difficult histories is necessary to break cycles of injustice.
Central to Edmonds' practice is a distinctive approach to color theory that centers brown as a site of beauty, complexity, and possibility. Working with a kaleidoscopic spectrum of browns, she challenges conventional artistic hierarchies while celebrating the richness of melanin. Although the stain interrupts each canvas, it does not always carry the same punctuation, some take a dominate force, others creep up on you. At times in the foreground, though most often in the background, the sludgy ruptures are enveloped by rhythmic cascades of impasto that create meditative fields of color. The paintings become sites of process, remembrance, and healing, affirming transformation despite generational trauma. Her pronounced, tallied brushstrokes evoke the collective repetition, mindfulness, and sustained presence required to realize genuine freedom.
The exhibition extends into her deconstructed Draped Flag series. Released from their rectangular supports, these canvases reveal individual loose threads and are cinched at the center to suggest a bodily presence. Intimate in scale, these works resemble children's clothing or hoodies, eliciting poignant reflections on the vulnerability of Black childhood in America. Here, Edmonds addresses the adultification of Black youth and honors those whose lives were stolen by racial violence—from Emmett Till to Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and countless others. These works memorialize lives cut short while challenging viewers to confront the structural systems that perpetuate such loss. As Maya Angelou wrote, "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
June Edmonds (b. 1959, Los Angeles, CA) was the subject of a mid-career survey at the Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA in 2021. Selected exhibitions include The Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades, CA; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA; Riverside Art Museum, CA; and Davis Museum of Art, Wellesley College, MA, amongst others. Institutional collections include California African American Art Museum; Davis Museum, MA; the Mead Art Museum, MA; and Crocker Art Museum, CA. Selected honors include the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts, a MacDowell Fellowship, The AWARE Prize at The Armory Show, and a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency, among others. Click here for full bio.