Charley Harper at Cincinnati’s Fab Frames

Apartment Therapy, 6 Jun 2008
By Maya Drozdz

Fabulous Frames & Art
Downtown: 17 West 4th St.
Montgomery: 10817 Montgomery Rd.
Northgate: 9632 Colerain Ave.

With three locations in Cincinnati, Fabulous Frames & Art is a good choice for custom-framing and limited-edition prints, but what really makes it special is its extensive inventory of prints by the late Charley Harper. A family-owned business for over 25 years, Fab Frames considers itself the world’s largest Harper dealer, stocking his limited-edition serigraphs, Giclée prints, lithographs, and posters, as well as greeting cards, books, adornments, mugs, and a new line of licensed home goods by Tag. The store also carries a limited selection of works by Charley’s wife Edie and son Brett. Prices vary from $2 for a notecard to the thousands for a rare print.

Harper moved to Cincinnati to study at the Art Academy, where he met his wife Edie. His prolific 60-year career included illustrations for Ford Times, The Golden Book of Biology, and Betty Crocker’s Dinner For Two Cook Book, as well as posters for the National Park Service and the Audubon Society. He also created limited-edition prints, many with clever pun-filled titles and descriptions. The Fab Frames site includes an exhaustive catalog of Harper’s prints, where you can research publication dates, editions, dimensions, alternate titles, and retail prices.

We’ve blogged about Harper before and, with the recent publication of three books by Ammo Books, including Todd Oldham’s Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life, now’s a great time to bring some of Harper’s “minimal realism” into your life!