The Cincinnati Art Museum will present The Art of Charley Harper: Creatures Wild and Tame, the first full-scale museum retrospective devoted to the Cincinnati-born mid-century illustrator and nature advocate, opening Oct. 16, 2026, and running through March 7, 2027.

The exhibition will bring together approximately 150 works spanning the full arc of Harper’s career, including 10 large acrylic paintings originally commissioned by the U.S. National Park Service — among them three canvases on loan from Everglades National Park making their first return to Cincinnati since completion. The show will also feature screen prints, watercolors, maquettes, and drawings that document Harper’s working methods. Harper, who studied and taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, developed a signature approach he called “minimal realism,” reducing natural forms to precise, color-saturated geometric shapes that express what curator Julie Aronson described as “a deep sense of wonder.”

Aronson, the museum’s curator of American paintings, sculpture, and drawings, said the exhibition will provide “fresh insight into his joyful artistry” while also documenting Harper’s role as a wildlife conservation advocate. The show is presented by P&G and funded in part by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art and the America 250-Ohio Commission, in partnership with the Charley Harper Art Studio. A simultaneous companion show, Edie McKee Harper: Modernist at Play, opens at the Taft Museum of Art on Oct. 17, offering the first solo museum presentation of work by Harper’s lifelong creative partner. An illustrated catalog will be co-published with D Giles, Ltd.

Source: Cincinnati Art Museum