June Mattingly
June Mattingly was born in 1932 at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and grew up on Park Avenue, attending the Dalton School. She came from a prominent German Jewish family whose roots in New York went back generations. Her paternal grandfather started streetcar advertising in New York and Philadelphia, and her father, Harold Weinberg, attended Lawrenceville and Princeton before being given a Dallas company that made porcelain enamel and neon signs. His firm created the original flying red horse Pegasus atop the Magnolia Hotel in 1934 and made signs, theater marquees, and architectural panels across Dallas. Her mother died young of cancer, and her father later remarried.
June graduated from Bennington College in 1953, where a beloved art instructor, Paul Feeley, sparked her lifelong passion for art. She had two children in New York before moving to Dallas for good in 1957, when her father helped her first husband secure a job as a stockbroker at First Southwest Company. Raising three children in four and a half years, she built contemporary homes in North Dallas, including a striking house on Straight Lane Circle. Once her children were older, she studied at North Texas and became a commercial interior designer for about eight years, working for a prominent architect and keeping an office in the Republic Bank tower.
In the 1980s, encouraged by New York dealers, June opened a contemporary art gallery, connecting with leading print publishers and famous artists. Guided by advice to feature Texas talent, she became a champion of Texas-based contemporary artists over a forty-year career, teaching at SMU, working for museums and magazines, and self-publishing ebooks to promote unrecognized artists. She founded the Dallas Art Dealers Association, helped found the Emergency Artist Support League, served on numerous boards, and earned three American Institute of Architects awards. A devoted environmentalist, vegetarian since childhood, and animal lover, she traveled the world photographing wildlife and reflected that, later in life, she was the happiest she had ever been.
Full Transcript
june the end of May right before June and that's how you got the name June right you know so that was how your parents got your name they named you June well let's go back 1932 Park Avenue New York lennux Lennox Hill Hospital lennux Hill Hospital tell us about what you remember when you were a little girl back in New York well I moved actually when I was almost eight i went to Dalton which was a private school and you know I don't really remember a whole lot because I was very young i I remember our apartment we lived at 1112 Park Avenue and I
have a lot of memories of New York because when I had my art gallery in the 80s I used to go back to New York at least three or four times a year because I um represented a lot of print publishers that um had a lot of very important artists like Jasper John's and Robert Rousenberg Andy Warhol um and because of my connection with the print publishers I got to visit their studios or have breakfast with them and I also had the money at the time to buy art by these artists i don't have it anymore and had to sell my art i sold it
beca before it became so valuable but I have art now what was your education to get into the industry well um I I moved to Dallas because my father when he graduated from Princeton was given um a company called Text Light which was uh eventually on Man away which is right off of Lemon Avenue near Field and his company made porcelain enamel and neon signs and daddy his name was Harold Weinberg made the original Pegasus or flying red horse on top of the mobile the Magnolia Hotel and he did that in his company did that in 1934 before we moved to Dallas and daddy also
made uh signs for all the major oil companies for Shell and Mobile and Exxon and um he made marquees for some of the theaters like the Lakewood and the Highland Park and the Inwood and I'm writing articles about all this now and I'm going to try to get it published for maybe D magazine um and a lot of them are historical landmarks seated the the um architectural uh uh porcelain enamel panels for the uh Hilton downtown that is now being made into a hotel and for a building on Irv Street and he did some panels for the second version of Lovefield he was really very
important yes but he he didn't think of it as being important he is much more into other things so your love for art then goes way back he goes way back he had a billboard company he that was part of his gift in Princeton he actually went bankrupt techite went bankrupt because he was doing architectural porcelain enamel and he didn't really know what he was doing so when you guys moved down from New York was it a culture shock for your family no because see my parents were born in New York and my grandparents were born in New York and I had a great uncle
who was enormously rich and his company was on the board of the New York Stock Exchange and when you were very rich in the 50s you became very philanthropic and you wanted everyone to know how much money you had mhm so one of the things he did when he he did for Temple Emanuel which is on Fifth Avenue and 60th Street he he put in the auditorium and the staircase but he also gave to Forom which is a Catholic college university right and then you go to New York and you stand in front of Lincoln Center there's a building that says Loenstein Forom um University
whatever it is but anyway it's this enorm enormous building and because of that we would go to Cardinal Spelman's home you believe that this nice Jewish people went to Cardinal Spelman's home which was right near Sax Fifth Avenue on Fifth Avenue and um we'd have lunch with the cardinal went there about five different times the whole family did how old were you at the time i was just out of college so you were an adult already did you realize the importance of that i think I did because my family always wanted you to know how important they were yeah yeah my mother died very young
she died in Dallas and she had cancer she died in her early 50s and Sorry and then he remarried what did your grandparents do for a living my grandfather on my father's side started street car advertising in New York and Philadelphia and he made a lot of money that's why he was able to give my father this big company in Dallas when and when my father went to Princeton he had a car in chauffeur and he went to Lawrenville which was very expensive he didn't he was very proper and then on my mother's side they were German Jewish as well and uh her father was
in the candy business with her with um his brother and they had money problems and when they went out of business so um so I'm third you know I'm a very third generation now your your grandparents at uh originally from Germany did they have any family that was in Germany during the war not that I recall okay we never talked about anything like that when I graduated from college my parents took me to Europe and we never talked about Hitler or anything like that it was just something we didn't talk terribly aware of it though and I've known people who were Okay tell me when
you came to Dallas for good i came to Dallas for good uh let's see i graduated from college in 53 i came to Dallas four years later in 57 i had already had two children in New York both were born in Mount Sonoi and um What college was it that you went to i went to Bennington okay is that where you met your husband yes I did but Bennington was incredible because I studied with an artist named Paul Feelely who was very very important after I got out of college he got cancer and he died but he was so important that they the Guggenheim Museum
gave him a retrospective and he was very very influential in my whole life i still can remember him and people to this day say "June how did you get interested in art?" And I said "Because I took a basic art course at Bennington and I had a mad crush on my instructor." Which is true he was gorgeous to look at plus being a good painter so well now here you are graduating from college and you have small children right and we didn't have enough money and we had all this rich family so my father who was living in Dallas got my husband a job at
First Southwest Company as a stock broker in downtown Dallas and he stayed there until he actually retired and uh he made a fair amount of money so that we could live much better than we could have lived had we lived stayed in New York we lived in North Dallas Lane and we actually built that house i was already into everything being contemporary and minimal and we bought the plans for the house and it was a very nice little three-bedroom house but it was not big enough my husband and I bought a lot on Straight Lane Circle which is just north of um Royal and I
looked and looked and I fell in love with all these architects who I wanted to build me a contemporary house that I could afford and I finally found one it's a stunning house it's still there uh Mary Mary McDerman has lived in it about 15 years it's a um it's a stunning contemporary house and I sold it when the kids got um you know grew up how did you keep yourself active well when I lived in my straight lane house and in on Melissa I had three children in four and a half years um and I did car pools and I was won prizes for
my flower arrangements and garden club and I played bridge and I um had in my atrium of my straight lane house I could have seated dinners so I learned how to cook and be a good cook and um I had an organic garden and um because I was already beginning to be a vegetarian when I was like about eight my parents for the summer took me to a um a dude ranch in Montana and they had a steer that they shot and they dismembered all in front of me and it was so horrible and I was supposed to eat the meat and I couldn't I've
never really wanted to eat meat since and I was like 8 years old after my kids started to get bigger I knew I had to have a career i was just that was not my lifestyle my children all went two went to college and one didn't one was a flower child and she lives in Leander which is south of Austin and my oldest daughter got three master's degrees one from uh plan two in Austin the University of Texas and one and two at Yale and my son went to North Texas mhm but um yeah we I sold the house and I went to North Texas
myself and I learned how to be a commercial interior designer which I did for about eight years mhm and um because my father's second wife um had uh started the Republic Bank I and I had clients in the Republic Bank i officed in the republic actually in the tower it was a little copy room and it was all windows and that was the time when if you had a copy machine you had black drapes all over your windows so I rented this little room where they had the copy machine took all the things off the windows and it was the most gorgeous office cuz it
overlooked downtown Dallas we had to pay $400 a month yeah now when was that that was in the 70s oh but it's times have changed on that rent you think oh I'm forever now your your uh your dad remarried uh Helen Florence right and her father is Rabbi Lebo he was one of the major rabbis the Temple Emanuel okay and my children worked in firms are you talking about Temple Emanuel in New York or Dallas in Dallas and you had a connection to Temple Emanuel in New York also because of my uncle great uncle having built the the staircase and it's got his name on
it it's a gorgeous and the other thing that Temple Emanuel in New York has is that their cemetery is in Westchester County and my parents and grandparents have a crypt in that cemetery and the thing that you don't realize which is fascinating is all the New York Jews that you never thought would people you never thought were Jewish it's really fascinating like that's where my parents are buried um and I want to be cremated let's go back uh to the 70s let's talk about your career now going back from there right well I had this I had worked for a very prominent architect first um
his name was Thomas Booziotus and um I worked for him for almost three years and I have to tell you a cute story i went to Fort Worth yesterday with the man I see all the time and we were in the um Aean Carter and there's a sign it says gift of Bates container and I said oh I know them and he said June how do you know them and I said well when I was single I I was told you could really meet interesting people at the Unitarian Church on Preston Road so I go in there and the first woman I meet is her
name is Betty Bates and she says what do you do and I said I'm a commercial interior designer and she says "You are?" She said "My husband needs someone like you he's got a factory in Arlington." And this is funny because he made cases for meat and stuff for the grocery stores which but he wanted his factory he wanted art on the ceiling and he wanted very contemporary furniture in his all his offices and I ended up doing their offices I mean their homes and it was just wonderful well I got that i love I love getting business in funny places now your second husband
was a Methodist how did that affect you not at all he was fabulous his name is Oliver and I was married to him for 19 years and I used to go to church with him and uh never bothered me and we're still very good friends yeah but also in the 70s you became a writer for D magazine i just wrote one article okay just the one article i knew a woman named Barbara she wrote for D magazine and she asked me to write about all the architecture in Dallas so I wrote about a house on Swiss Al Avenue avenue and a a church on uh
Gas and it had been made into a home for an artist it was kind of interesting now that was my first attempt at writing and I must say the whole article was rewritten but that was okay but it was the cover story which wasn't all bad now what helped you become a strong believer in God my second husband he was very religious what made me really religious was about four years ago when I was so desperately sick and um I was I had five major surgeries and I was in and out of Baylor almost uh oh over 6 months 3 months here two months there
and I was desperately sick and um it really made me believe in God because he pulled me through yeah yeah because I would say to my doctor especially to my internist you know I want to die i am in such pain i can't stand it and he would say no you're going to make it June you know and I think that's very important and the man that I date now is very religious he's um Episcopalian uh and then I had a man in between who was a devout Catholic so I you know I've always been attracted to very religious people but I'm not particularly Jewish
let's talk about your contemporary art career back in the 80s Oliver was uh very influential in fact he he and I went to New York he had to give a seminar and we stayed at the Essex House and which is not far from 57th Street you know I took him to a lot of galleries and we went to a gallery actually down in Soho which was run by a woman named Mary Boon who's a very very important dealer and she remembered me from years and years ago when I lived on Straight Lane and I bought a painting from her and he was so impressed that
I knew this woman and she said to me "June you ought to open an art gallery so I I went back to New York and I went into Castelli leo Castelli was one of the most important dealers in the world he he showed people like Rashenberg and Andy Warhol and I mean he was he discovered Donald Judith Kelly he discovered all these very important contemporary artists and I visited with his wife who had a print gallery on Madison Avenue and she was the one that said too also you should open an art gallery there are not enough art galleries in Dallas so she introduced me
and my husband to this woman who had a studio on in East Icelip New York and she had a print shop and she made Jasper John's first lithograph in 1970 so I connected with her connected and I really wanted to open a print gallery because to me you could buy a print by someone like Andy Warhol then maybe for $1,500 which you had today maybe um $200,000 to buy a painting so I thought it was just a great way to own you know very famous artist but I couldn't I couldn't afford it so I had a lot of prints but uh I um decided to
do something else and actually a woman from SMU came in my gallery and she said "All you've got up on the walls are men and no Texas artists and and all men." She said "June you must change what you're doing." I had taken a course from artist and uh she was right so from then on I did prints a little quite a bit but I really got into Texas-based contemporary artists and I'm still there did you found the the Dallas Art Dealers Association i founded the Dallas Art Dealers Association tell us about that and I found and I was one of the founders of Easel
which is the Emergency Artist Support League and which is sort of phased out but we really I was on the board of that we supported a lot of artists who had problems you know just for maybe a surgical procedure or something it wasn't long term but it was really wonderful organization and and now you're still active professionally tell us about what you're doing now well after I closed my gallery I worked for Fredo LA for 5 years and I did educational art exhibits for them and also while I had the gallery I taught at SMU for four semesters on collecting contemporary art mhm and um
I've realized on my 40-year career in art how curious people are about contemporary art and really how little they know about it so and I knew about all these fabulous Texas artists because Texas not only is it big but it has basically good climate compared to living in New York or complet living in Los Angeles you can live in Texas much less for less money and there are museums all through the state and it has all these University of Texas colleges in cities all over the state and so it's just full of really good artists and the one thing that I'm very proud of is
that I have an extremely good eye and I'm very good at discovering unrecognized artists that's what I love to do and that's what my ebooks are about i tried so hard to get my books published a hard coverver book published on Texas Artists and I was turned down by everybody when I realized I could self-publish an ebook for maybe $1,000 I decided to do ebooks well of course it's such a new medium that most people who are interested in art don't know what in the world how to get to an ebook they've been out now for about a year and a half and they're selling
better and I'm on Amazon and I'm on everything oh it's all so confusing to me but I want to stay up tod date you know I want to do the right thing so what what are your goals for your ebooks then to really let these artists become well known and I've I've actually I've worked for two magazines one was online and then one was a printed magazine and I'm trying to get a job with another big magazine right now because I I'm learning how to be a better writer uh what I I just think these artists should be known they uh and because you go
to New York or you go to Europe and nobody knows much about most of these artists now some of them you know have shown at the modern and they've shown at the um uh Whitney and the Guggenheim and and in Austin and you know there a lot of them are they're all almost all faculty mhm and um very very bright and um so you know it's just to nurture their careers and it's it's interesting because a lot of these people since I put them in the ebook even are becoming better known because people are reading those books now you know your achievements have been many
over the years have you been rewarded in any way yes I have three American Institute of Architect awards i when I lived with Oliver I lived on the Katy Trail and we got two architects awards for one of the residences we built actually 12 houses on Katy Trail because he owned all his property and when we moved on the Katy Trail the train was still running mhm and I was put on the board and uh of course now it's it's going to be amazing it's probably going to go all over Texas at some point long after I'm gone but um that was a very big
project of mine to work on the Katy Trail i love that and then I was on the board of Planned Parenthood i mean these are honors in a way to be put on these boards and I was on the board of the Dallas Zoological Society and I gave a party uh for the opening of Walls of Africa with Jane Good for Jane Goodall and then I was very active on the Dallas Museum of Art and I uh ran Friends of Contemporary Art for two years and I got 60 new members to the I think they were 30 when they started it and I raised $75,000
and we bought the most gorgeous Anish Kapoor which is probably worth a million and a half now and um I did Bozarts Ball i did Art for Sale and did all Texas-based artists then did the first one in the 70s in the old museum then I was on the uh Mckin Avenue Contemporary Board but I got three American Institute of Architect awards one was for the house on near the trail and the other one was from an office building in um Preston Royal i went to uh Book Hollow Country Club to a singles party and I'm always losing things and I was very uncomfortable going
to a singles party because I grew up that you the man approached the woman the woman didn't approach the man so I was so happy when the cocktail era was over and we could go sit down well I don't I'd lost my seat my table number and I got his other table number and I sat next to Oliver and I didn't know anything about demography or what he did or anything and uh he said "I'm thinking about building an office building in Preston Royal." And I said "Really?" He said "And I'm going to use an architect." And I said "Who?" And he said "Budgesby." And
I think that's what made me I thought "My god this man knows the best architect in Dallas maybe I should be more interested what was the happiest time in your life i have to say right now I'm about the happiest I've ever been i have a wonderful man in my life i feel like I've done a lot of worthwhile things in my life and I'm very happy yeah I'm very content you know I've done some amazing traveling well tell me about your travels well when I lived on the Katy Trail um the the man who became the director of the Dallas Zoo became my friend
he lived on the same street that I lived on with Oliver and he knew how well traveled I was culturally i'd been all over the world to you know Paris and Madrid and Barcelona i'm looking at my notes here helsinki Vancouver everywhere casablanca Beijing very well cairo Moscow very well traveled so he said "June I would like you to do a travel program for the zoo." Well I was so incredibly busy running my gallery i was working on 10 12 hours a day but I thought I'll do it so he came up with a trip with the San Diego Zoo and I was so busy
i didn't even have much really time to read the s read the brochure and I get on the plane and I had 104 degree temperature i was just exhausted we get to Kenya to Nairobi and they give us an outline of the trip and it's all camping and I you know I'm wide open i think that's okay well it was fabulous the first thing we do is we go out in one of these vans this was in the early8s and um I see a baby leopard i'm so nervous I can't even take a picture of it because leopards are usually in the trees well that
was the beginning of the end i had of course I'm such an environmentalist and I adore animals so I spent the next 10 or 12 years doing two to three trips a year photographing wild animals in the most ridiculous places that I mean I got very like one place I got this um uh bug repellent in my eye and almost lost my eyesight and I I was in um Batswana which is west uh east Africa and I and I could barely get to Johannesburg and I could barely get to London took British Airways took me to the doctor and he fixed me he says "You
won't lose your eye." And he banished my head all up and I get off the plane in Dallas and my husband is hysterical cuz all my trips you know like I white watered at the base of Victoria Falls how I I mean they don't even do it anymore it's the most dangerous falls in the world and I almost got killed because they they one passenger in this big uh rubber raft we'd already gone down like 10 falls and he wanted to get out and they tied the boat up the raft up and the raft fell and went all the way down and I barely got
onto a rock i mean and then I had to climb all the way down to where the raft was i climb out of the fall my god but you know something it's the most wonderful thing i'm so strong you know even in Patagonia oh my gracious it was the last day they every morning they would they would rate the hikes the easiest little bit harder hardest and I always took the easiest and we start off and everything's fun even though it's very high mountains and all this stuff i mean and it gets to be like 2:00 and the trail ends and there's just a a
ledge and 400 ft down and I thought I said to the to the leader "I can't do that i got to go back to where we came from." And he says "June you can't do that." I said "I can't cross that thing i have terrible fear of heights." So there were like 12 people on the tour so they take my backpack which is enormous because the the temperature changes so in Patagonia and you don't take enough food and all and he and he directs me he says "You have to cross on your rear end and you can't look down and I'll sit right next to
you and you'll make it." Well of course I did cuz I'm here but scared oh my gracious but I made it oh and the other thing about this trip is they made you put up your tent well I didn't I never I stayed in many tents but I never had to put it up so I befriended this lovely couple from Alaska actually they helped me because we made four different tent um installations whatever you call it and they helped me yeah yeah and you have a great interest in animals i love animals i have a kitty cat now and that went back to time you
were a little girl we always had pets and I always wanted to go to the zoo now see I don't want to go to the zoo anymore because I don't think animals should be captive and I don't think people should go looking at animals in the wild i think it's very wrong because we're put we're in interfering with their lives you know but um yes I I've always been interested in animals i never because uh my environmental interests you know being I I recycle everything i even when I had little kids I was going over to Harry Hines recycling everything and I'm still telling people
why don't you recycle this why don't you recycle that well in your lifetime there's been so many momentous occasions you lived through the Great Depression of course World War II right kenny assassination here in Dallas something good the moon landing for the first time in ' 69 that was incredible i actually I actually saw that on TV in San Francisco with my first husband and I saw Kennedy being shot because I was in the department store buying a TV for my kids i try to be cheerful and happy and Yeah that's the way you have to be well you have three children what advice do
you want to leave to the next generation well just stay optimistic and be honest don't lie don't don't steal don't do any bad things because you always get caught well good job today thanks for doing this you did wonderful well thank you much better than all right you're very very good thank you