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9781643365596 Academic Inspection Copy

A Dream Deferred

The Art and Activism of Edwin Augustus Harleston
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The first full-length biography of one of South Carolina's most significant African American visual artists Excluded from the Charleston Renaissance because of his race and pushed to the edges of the Harlem Renaissance by geography and circumstance, Edwin Augustus Harleston was an artist caught between worlds. Despite being marginalized within his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, during his lifetime, Harleston nonetheless pursued his career as a painter, first at Charleston's Avery Institute, later at Atlanta University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Harleston received commissions and had gallery exhibitions that received critical praise in northern cities. When the demands of family pulled him back to Charleston, where he struggled to find the same freedom or acclaim that he had enjoyed in the North. In A Dream Deferred, Akua McDaniel offers the first comprehensive biography of Harleston. McDaniel considers not only his efforts to redefine the image of Black life in American visual culture, but she also examines Harleston's life as a social and political activist, including his role in founding the first NAACP chapter in South Carolina. McDaniel offers a full portrait of Harleston's life and career, one that had an outsized impact on the American art world, and beyond.
Akua McDaniel is Associate Professor of Art History emerita at Spelman College. She was founding director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art and is the nation's leading scholar of Edwin A. Harleston.
M. Akua McDaniel, sets the record straight. Her new biography offers a compelling portrait of Harleston's artistic ambition and accomplishments and his many disappointments. Hers is an even telling: McDaniel brings expertise in evaluating artistic merit and describing the painterly qualities of Harleston's work, while offering the broader context of the challenges of the time and place in which he was working. -- "Charleston Magazine" McDaniel crafts a worthy tribute to an overlooked artist driven to 'present an accurate Black image to the public' but constrained by the era's prejudices. The result is a valuable window into Black American life and art in the late 19th and early 20th century South. -- "Publishers Weekly"
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