June Felter

1919–2019

June Felter (1919–2019) was born in Oakland, California, and worked as a commercial illustrator before and during World War II, turning to fine art full-time in the 1950s. She studied at the Oakland Art Institute, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the San Francisco Art Institute (1960–61), where she trained under Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Fred Martin and was strongly influenced by David Park’s work. A central figure in the Bay Area Figurative movement, Felter co-founded the Tuesday Drawing Group, a life-drawing circle of Bay Area artists that met for about four decades, and taught at SFMOMA, where her students included Wayne Thiebaud. The 1991 Oakland firestorm destroyed her home, studio, and hundreds of early works, but she continued painting into her nineties, including a series responding to the fire and, a decade later, to the September 11 attacks. Her watercolors, drawings, and still lifes are held in the collections of SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, and the Monterey Museum of Art, among others.

Links: https://lostartsalon.com/collections/june-felter
https://crownpoint.com/artist/june-felter/

Sources: Lost Art Salon. "June Felter." Accessed October 14, 2026. https://lostartsalon.com/collections/june-felter.

Crown Point Press. "June Felter." Accessed October 14, 2026. https://crownpoint.com/artist/june-felter/.