An exhibit dedicated to the work of Edie Harper, and the first full-scale exhibition of Charley Harper's paintings, will open this October at the Taft Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum, respectively. The couple met, married and worked in Cincinnati.
Taft Curator Tamera Muente says Edie Harper may not be as well-known as her husband.
“A lot of people who do know Edie’s work think it’s very similar to Charley’s and there are some similarities in their interests,” Muente says. “But Edie is so much her own artist.”
The Taft will have more than 100 works from her entire career.
Muente says this will be the first solo museum exhibit for Edie Harper's work.
“There have been a lot of shows about Charley and Edie together but, I think when people visit both shows they’ll see that they both deserve their own representation,” Muente says. “We thought ‘Why has a museum never done this? Why has nobody deeply researched her career and written about it?,' and all those things. There have been some things written but not a major retrospective.”
Curator of paintings, sculpture, and drawings Julie Aronson says the Cincinnati Art Museum has hosted Charley Harper exhibitions before, in 2007 and 2010. She says this will be much larger.
“These exhibitions are going to shed new light on Harper. You may think you know him well, but you’re going to learn a lot of things that you didn’t know about him,” Aronson says. “There were lots of surprises when I started delving into looking at the work.”
About 150 Charley Harper pieces are expected to be on display.
“It’s going to feature his entire career from early work all the way almost to his death,” Aronson says. “It’s really going to show you a much bigger range of work than you would have seen in these other exhibitions.”
Aronson says the exhibit will include what they fondly call Harper's originals.
“Which means that they are works of art that often he made in preparation for posters and screen prints and other things,” she says.
The Taft Museum exhibition will run from October to January. The Cincinnati Art Museum's exhibit is from October to next March.
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