Harold Keller: Portals

EXHIBITION DATES: Jan. 15 – March 8

LOCATION: Walton Art Center Alexander Gallery

ABOUT:

This exhibition celebrates the distinct art of Harold Keller (1928-2017) from the collection of the University of Arkansas Fort Smith Gallery of Art and Design, the largest repository of the artist’s work and where he taught from 1956-1962. The university’s collection is based on an extensive donation made by the artist’s family in 2024, including paintings, drawings, ceramics, and artist books along with three hundred working drawings and studies the artist used to produce his finished works.

Keller had a prodigious artistic career of over seventy years and a teaching career of thirty-five. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1928, he came to the University of Arkansas in 1946 to pursue a degree in medicine. With greater interests in the arts and humanities, he instead concentrated on studio art and philosophy, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1949. After teaching for several Arkansas high schools, he became professor of art at Fort Smith Junior College (now University of Arkansas – Fort Smith) from 1956 to 1962, when he and his family returned to New York. Earning a Master of Arts in Art Education from New York University during his time in Fort Smith, he continued to teach in higher education until 1985.

Situating his uniquely playful and humorous yet thoughtful, earnest work in its art historical context and examining the artists influences, this exhibition also explores his development through several phases of his prodigious and multifaceted career as represented in the UAFS Gallery of Art and Design’s permanent collection—his years in Arkansas, his distinct paintings of the 1970s through the 1980s, his working processes, his turn to drawings on mylar in the 1990s, and his artists books made in his later years in collaboration with his wife, June Keller.

Harold Keller: Portals explores the artist’s unique fusion of the fantastic with the everyday, a style known as magic realism. His magical realms, however, were also critical reflections and explorations of reality, with imaginative configurations and reinterpretations of art, religion, culture, personal memories, and immediate experiences—all a part of the continuum of everyday existence, his paintings suggest. They also demonstrate how his experiences in Arkansas had a lasting impact on his art.