A Dream Deferred

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.

Author Biography

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.