Two Cincinnati institutions will present companion exhibitions this fall celebrating the work of Charley and Edie Harper, the husband-and-wife artists who built their careers in the city. The Cincinnati Art Museum will mount a retrospective of approximately 150 works by Charley Harper, while the Taft Museum of Art will present Edie Harper’s first solo museum retrospective, featuring more than 100 pieces spanning her entire career.

The exhibitions are scheduled to open in October 2026. The Taft show runs through January 2027, and the Cincinnati Art Museum display continues through March 2027. The couple met, married, and established their studio practices in Cincinnati during the 1940s. Despite decades of shared life and work, curators at both institutions said each artist merits separate examination on their own terms. “There have been a lot of shows about Charley and Edie together, but they both deserve their own representation,” said Tamera Muente, curator at the Taft Museum of Art.

Julie Aronson, curator of paintings, sculpture, and drawings at the Cincinnati Art Museum, noted that the CAM show will be larger than the museum’s previous Charley Harper exhibitions in 2007 and 2010, and will include a group of ten large paintings Harper completed on commission for the U.S. National Park Service’s Interior Department — works that were publicly displayed in Washington, D.C. for only a brief period in the 1990s. Aronson said the exhibitions together will “shed new light” on both artists’ contributions to American art.

Source: WVXU