Collection of UAFS Gallery of Art and Design
About the Exhibition
Walton Arts Center
Alexander Gallery at Porter Art Warehouse
212 N. West Ave., Fayetteville, Arkansas
January 15 – March 8, 2026
This exhibition celebrates the distinctive art of Harold Keller (1928-2017) and is drawn from the collection of the University of Arkansas Fort Smith Gallery of Art and Design.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928, Harold Keller came to the University of Arkansas (in Fayetteville) in 1946. Concentrating on studio art and philosophy, he earned a BA 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) in 1956, where he taught until 1962, when he returned to New York. He continued teaching until 1985. He continued his creative activity until shortly before his death in 2017.
Harold Keller: Portals showcases his playful and humorous yet thoughtful, work in its art historical context and examines his influences. The exhibition explores his development through several phases of his career as represented in the UAFS Gallery of Art and Design’s permanent collection—his years in Arkansas, his paintings of the 1970s through the 1980s, his working processes, his turn to drawings on mylar in the 1990s, and the books made in his later years in collaboration with his wife, June Clayton Keller.
Harold Keller: Portals explores the artist’s 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 experience. His work suggests that all are a part of the continuum of everyday existence.