In a recent post, we looked at how Charley Harper’s work—his “minimal realism,” his birds and animals—found a natural home in Motawi clay. But that story was never just about one artist.
“I always thought they were toe to toe,” said Brett Harper, director of the Charley Harper Art Studio.
He’s talking about his parents—Charley Harper, whose work came to define a distinct strain of American modernism, and Edie McKee Harper (1922–2010), an artist whose work moved just as confidently across painting, photography, textile, and design.
By the time Charley Harper’s work found its way into tile, his visual language was already well established—clarity, control, economy of form. But inside the house where that work was made, there was always another artist working alongside him.
For Brett, the imbalance in recognition has never quite made sense. “A lot of it is because I feel like she was overlooked a bit as a woman artist,” he said. “Which is sort of the way it was in the day.”
Their work shares a common language—reduction, clarity, economy of form—but it lands differently.
The Color Architect
Inside the Harper home, the work unfolded in parallel.
“Charley had a studio attached to the house by a boardwalk,” Brett said. “And Edie had a studio in the basement.”
They worked separately, but the exchange was constant. “They would show each other what they were working on,” Brett said. “And they would comment on it.” Often, those conversations came down to color.
Edie, Charley, and son Brett in their Roselawn basement, c. 1956
“One thing Edie did, which a lot of people don’t know,” Brett said, “is that when Charley was doing the prints, Edie mixed all the colors—all the inks, for Charley’s early serigraphs.”
Color in a Harper print isn’t incidental. It has to hold its place against line and form across an entire composition. Getting it right requires consistency and precision.
“She was spot on with the color,” Brett said.
Seen that way, Edie wasn’t assisting—she was shaping the finished work at a fundamental level.
It’s a role that resonates at Motawi, where glaze is developed with similar care. The relationship between line and color—between boundary and fill—is what makes the image hold.
Early instincts
Edie’s sense of making started early.
As a young girl in Kansas City, she staged elaborate tea parties—alone, as only children often find themselves—building them out of whole cloth. Years later, she turned that memory into an illustrated scene, complete with a bulldog “servant” balancing tea ware across its broad back.
She described art as a kind of refuge. School, she said, “was made bearable by art and drama classes,” including a summer course taught in the attic of a Kansas City home, where she pushed herself to copy paintings with unusual precision—even in stifling heat.
At the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where she enrolled in 1940, she studied everything from realism to abstraction, including time with Josef Albers. Her early work leaned toward Surrealism before moving toward the clarity and reduction that would define her later work.
Work, and what it required
During World War II, while Charley served overseas, Edie worked as a photographer and technician for the Army Corps of Engineers in Cincinnati.
She photographed soil samples, concrete cross-sections, and engineering experiments—images used for military planners to understand how materials would perform under stress, including on wartime airfields.
The work could feel routine, but the discipline stayed with her. She continued using her 8x10 camera long after leaving the Corps, applying the same attention to texture and surface in her own work.
By the mid-1950s, she was a respected fine art photographer, with a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in 1961.
Making a life in art
Edie and Charley met on the first day of art school—September 9, 1940.
“They just kind of became an item,” Brett said.
After the war, they married and set out on what Brett describes as “The Great Honeymoon,” traveling across the United States, drawing and painting along the way. The trip produced hundreds of works and established a rhythm they would carry forward: separate studios, shared ideas.
In California, they visited photographer Edward Weston. Surrounded by his cats, they purchased a small print—driftwood, priced at $25—that Brett still keeps today. Brett himself was named after Weston’s son, the photographer Brett Weston—a small detail that hints at the artistic circles they were moving in.
Back in Cincinnati, Edie resumed working in a basement studio, balancing her own practice with family responsibilities and, at times, caring for her father as his health declined.
Subjects, and what stayed
“Cats, children and childhood memories, and Bible stories,” Brett said.
Those themes remained consistent, even as her work moved across media—painting, textiles, enamel, photography. Her cats, in particular, became a throughline, often drawn from the pets that moved through the Harper household.
The titles often carried humor—puns, wordplay, small shifts in meaning.
“It was a reduction,” Brett said. “A simplified work that reduced the design to its lowest number of elements.”
Bringing Edie into clay
At Motawi, working with Edie Harper’s designs starts the same way it did with Charley’s: by looking closely at what needs to carry through.
Her work translates naturally in many ways—clear forms, defined shapes, color doing real work—but it presents a slightly different set of decisions.
Motawi’s Cuenca technique relies on raised lines to contain glaze, creating clean separations. The challenge is keeping the character of the original without over-defining it.
The goal isn’t to reinterpret the work. It’s to translate it faithfully—adjusting line weight where needed, keeping the composition intact, and letting the glaze do its part.
Reduced to its essence.
A living legacy
The Harper legacy has always been a two-person story.
That’s becoming easier to see now. A major retrospective of Edie Harper’s work, Edie McKee Harper: Modernist at Play, opens October 17 at the Taft Museum of Art, bringing her work into clearer focus. Spanning more than 100 works across photography, painting, enamel, weaving, and print, the exhibition places her alongside Charley as a parallel body of work.
Seen together, the similarities and differences come into focus. The work shares a foundation, even as each artist takes it in slightly different directions. The exhibitions, close enough to be seen in a single day, offer a rare chance to experience both bodies of work in that context.
At Motawi, that same idea now carries into tile.
Beginning June 11, Motawi will release several new cat tiles based on Edie Harper’s work, bringing her imagery into clay for the first time alongside Charley’s. Seen together—as tiles, as objects you live with—the relationship becomes clearer.
It was always there.
To celebrate the launch, Motawi will host a special dinner and preview event with Nawal Motawi at 7 pm on June 10 at Three Cats Cafe, adjacent to Leon & Lulu in downtown Clawson, Michigan. Reservations are available through Resy.
