June Freeman, who changed the face of the art community in Pine Bluff and southeast Arkansas and pushed the boundaries of art and architecture across the state, died Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz. She was 95.
Freeman was born and grew up in New Jersey. When she was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, she met her future husband, Edmond Freeman, who, along with his brother Armistead, would soon run the Pine Bluff Commercial.
She moved to Pine Bluff with Edmond, noting in a 2017 interview, when she was nominated to be inducted into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame, that she was always a bit of an outsider and that that was probably for the best.
But she didn’t meddle in her husband’s newspaper operation, nor was she content to be in his shadow. Instead, she looked for opportunities to spread her appreciation first of art and then of architecture, rarely failing in her pursuits.
“She didn’t take no for an answer,” said her daughter, Gretchen Freeman, who lives in Phoenix and helped care for Freeman. “She was driven and expected people to work as hard as she did.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Freeman was close to completing her doctoral degree in clinical psychology, and when she got to Pine Bluff she was one of the first in the area to conduct psychological testing. But it would be her dedication to being an artist in her own right and her love of art and architecture that would become one of the most significant imprints on her life.
It may have all started with an old, unused fire station. As she notes in the Hall of Fame interview, a church wanted to tear down the WPA-era structure to expand its parking lot. But Freeman had bigger plans for the modest building, turning it into what would be called The Little Firehouse Community Arts Center, the progenitor of the Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas.
In the beginning, she held exhibits and classes at the Little Firehouse, giving famed architect E. Fay Jones his first showing of his drawings.
She also drew in artists from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, saying the art program there “was the only bright light in the arts in Pine Bluff.”
Rachel Miller, who was hired in 2017 as director of the Arts and Science Center, said she got a call from Freeman shortly after taking the new job. The two went to lunch, and Freeman filled her in on the history of the arts center and Pine Bluff.
“She was a real force,” said Miller, who met Freeman before eventually marrying her artist son Eric. “She was very passionate about the arts and artists, especially new artists, and the Pine Bluff community. The design of the new ARTSpace on Main was directly influenced by her design of the Little Firehouse. She’s the whole reason the Arts and Science Center exists today.”
Miller, who is now the director of the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History in California, also said the addition of “science” in the name of the arts center was no accident.
“She introduced the science element to the facility,” Miller said. “She wanted to set this arts center apart by introducing science as a core principle.”
Freeman established the Sister City program in Pine Bluff, connecting the city with Iwai City, Japan, in the early 1980s. She also served as the director of state services for the Arkansas Arts Center, started the arts center’s Artmobile to take art to residents around the state and established the Arkansas Artists’ Registry as a way to help artists disseminate their work. And from 1986 to 1995, Freeman wrote Artline, a column in the Pine Bluff Commercial.
Freeman was also the founder and director of the Architecture and Design Network, a nonprofit organization that sponsored free lecture series on the art of architecture. After she retired, the network’s board named the lecture series after her.
Freeman also took on other causes, establishing the League of Women Voters in Pine Bluff and becoming a member of the Women’s Emergency Committee, which worked to integrate Central High School.
Freeman’s children described her as bold in her approach to life and issues.
“People had strong opinions about mom,” Eric Freeman said. “So many people loved her, but she had an intense personality. One of the things that I learned from her is to never give up. She was sensitive and had incredible initiative, and she cared about people. She was also a maverick in that she loved creating things and she loved joining people together.”
Freeman also said what was on her mind. In the early 1970s, she was attending a national publishers’ meeting in New York with Edmond and found herself on an elevator with Richard Nixon’s embattled Vice President Spiro Agnew, who would go on to resign from office. “You oughta be ashamed of yourself,” Freeman is said to have told Agnew.
Freeman, who called herself a “great short-order cook,” and Edmond took the family on extensive vacations, according to Gretchen. On one, the parents loaded all the kids in the family car for a three-week vacation to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico to climb all of the pyramids.
“My parents had a great interest in architecture and anthropology and in Mayan culture,” Gretchen said. “So they followed the La Ruta Maya all through Central America. When she was 77 and dad was 79, they climbed Mt. Fuji in Japan and then hiked in Italy. They went to bullfights all over South and Central America and Spain. And when mom was 90, she and I went to Finland because she felt a real connection with the Finnish people and culture.”
Freeman and Edmond were married for 70 years. He died in 2021 at the age of 94.
June Freeman is survived by her four children: her daughter, Gretchen Freeman and her husband Alan Silverman of Phoenix; and three sons, Andrew and Joyce Freeman of Frisco, Texas; David Freeman and his wife Ellen Kunes of Salisbury, Conn.; and Eric Freeman and his wife Rachel Miller of Carmel, Calif.
The family said Freeman’s body will be cremated and that funeral arrangements are yet to be determined but will likely include a celebration of her life sometime in the spring.