Two Cincinnati museums will open exhibitions this fall that put Charley and Edie Harper’s work in separate focus. The Cincinnati Art Museum opens The Art of Charley Harper: Creatures Wild and Tame on October 16, and the Taft Museum of Art follows a day later with Edie McKee Harper: Modernist at Play. Both are first full museum retrospectives for their respective artists.
Two Museums, One Shared Story
The timing isn't a coincidence. As reported by Cincinnati Magazine, the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Taft Museum of Art joined forces to present tandem exhibitions examining both halves of the Harper partnership. Charley Harper's exhibition, which runs through March 7, 2027, is described by the Cincinnati Art Museum as the institution's first full-scale, scholarly exhibition of his work. The museum's press materials put the show at approximately 150 works, though its own exhibition page describes it as featuring more than 140 drawings, gouaches, collages, screen prints, paintings and posters — a discrepancy the museum has not reconciled in its public materials.
The Taft’s Edie McKee Harper: Modernist at Play runs October 17 through January 24, 2027, and includes more than 100 works in photography, painting, enamel, weaving and print, according to the museum. The Taft describes it as the first museum exhibition, with its own catalog, to examine the full range of Edie Harper’s work on its own terms rather than as an adjunct to her husband’s career.
Two Artists Who Met as Students
Charley Harper, who grew up in Frenchton, West Virginia, and Edie Harper, a Kansas City, Kansas native, met as students at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1940 and married in 1947, per Cincinnati Magazine's reporting. Charley died in 2007 at age 84; Edie died in 2010 at age 87. Their only child, Brett Harper, now serves as director of the Charley Harper Art Studio and president of the Edie and Charley Harper Foundation, and he supported both exhibitions with his own collection, archives and art-world connections, Cincinnati Magazine reports.
Brett Harper has described his parents as equal in ability and vision, while saying his mother received less recognition. In an interview with Motawi Tileworks, he said, “A lot of it is because I feel like she was overlooked a bit as a woman artist.” Cincinnati Magazine has also reported that he sees championing her work as a way to repay the sacrifices she made raising him.
What's Actually on the Walls
The Cincinnati Art Museum’s Charley Harper exhibition brings together maquettes, drawings, screen prints, acrylic paintings, watercolors, tools, photographs, books, magazines and ephemera, Cincinnati Magazine reports. It will also include two works by Edie Harper. Among the featured works are 10 large acrylic paintings commissioned from Charley Harper by the National Park Service and later adapted into posters between 1976 and 1990; the original paintings were exhibited in Washington, D.C., in 1997. The museum says the accompanying catalog is about 250 pages and contains more than 200 illustrations. Harper is widely known for colorful, stylized depictions of nature; designer Todd Oldham authored a coffee-table book about his work in 2007.
Cincinnati Art Museum curator Julie Aronson, who oversees American paintings, sculpture and drawings for the museum, is involved in the Charley Harper show, Cincinnati Magazine reports. At the Taft, curator Tamera Muente leads a team of four curators assembling the Edie Harper retrospective. That show traces Edie's roughly 60-year career through themes including the American landscape, abstraction, storytelling and the animal world, according to the Taft Museum of Art. Edie enrolled in the Art Academy of Cincinnati's first photography class and created portraiture and abstract photography through the 1940s and 1950s before moving into the childhood memories, cats, and Old and New Testament stories that defined much of her later work, per Cincinnati Magazine.
Leaders Weigh In on Edie's Overdue Recognition
Cincinnati Art Museum director Cameron Kitchin and Taft Museum of Art president and CEO Rebekah Beaulieu are among the museum leaders involved in the exhibitions, Cincinnati Magazine reports. Beaulieu has described Edie Harper’s art as playful and challenging to viewers; the Taft’s exhibition presents that work as deserving attention in its own right.
Both exhibitions will have print catalogs, and the museums are planning a joint public panel discussion about the artists’ practices, according to the Cincinnati Art Museum. The partnership brings the two institutions’ fall calendars together around the Harpers’ work. The Cincinnati Art Museum previously presented Harper exhibitions in 2007 and 2010, according to WVXU; the current show is the first there to examine his work at full scholarly scale.
How the New Charley Harper Show Differs
The Cincinnati Art Museum says its earlier Harper presentations were smaller in scope: Minimal Realism: Charley and Edie Harper, 1940–1960, ran August 18–October 21, 2007, and Big Country: Charley Harper Draws America ran June 12–September 5, 2010. Both focused only on work made before 1960, unlike the current exhibition, which covers Harper’s entire career, according to the Cincinnati Art Museum.
The Harpers' Fingerprints Are Already Around Cincinnati
The Harpers’ work is also visible around Cincinnati. Charley Harper’s Homecoming (Blue Birds) became an ArtWorks mural downtown in 2012, Cincinnati Magazine reports; WVXU places it at Court and Walnut streets. Edie Harper’s Crazy Cat, Crazy Quilt was adapted into another downtown ArtWorks mural in 2017, according to Cincinnati Magazine. A 2017 report from Cincinnati.com described the planned mural at 30 E. Central Parkway as covering more than 8,000 square feet.
A commercial assignment helped bring Charley Harper’s wildlife art to a wider audience. According to Ford, his career as a wildlife artist took off in the early 1950s after a Ford magazine editor assigned him a series on feeder birds. Ford had also commissioned Harper in 1952 to paint Transportation Around the World, a mural honoring the Model T inside the Ford Rotunda in Dearborn. Around that period, Charley and Edie made hundreds of silkscreen prints together in a workshop in Edie’s parents’ basement, Ford reports.
With the shows opening a day apart, visitors can see the work of both artists in Cincinnati this fall: Charley Harper’s stylized birds and wildlife at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and a broader view of Edie Harper’s work at the Taft. The paired exhibitions offer a chance to consider their artistic partnership while seeing each artist’s work presented separately.
