WRITER: — PHOTOGRAPHER:
What fuels the creative impulse? The question is as old as the human spirit—and central to it. The quest for beauty, the desire to represent that essential wonderment that stirs the imagination, has propelled our species to draw on caves, erect pyramids, paint frescoes on chapel ceilings, and doodle in the margins of boring textbooks. The artistic impulse is universal, transcending all barriers established by social, racial, and geopolitical constructs, but sadly, precisely because of those barriers, not all artists get their due.
That was the case for Edwin Augustus Harleston, a Charleston-born African American artist of the early 1900s, who, despite his talent and classical training in the country’s most elite art institutions, never fully achieved the national recognition and acclaim he aspired to. Nor was he embraced by his local colleagues, artists such as Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and Elizabeth O’Neill Verner of the Charleston Renaissance, who were self-taught, and importantly, white. In A Dream Deferred (USC Press, 2026), art historian, professor, and founding director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art 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.
Today, you can find six of Harleston’s portraits and paintings in the permanent collection of the Gibbes Museum of Art, but during his lifetime (1882–1931) that was not the case. He was denied an exhibition at The Charleston Museum after the Carolina Arts Association, of which Smith and Verner were leading members, convinced museum director Laura Bragg, who had teased Harleston with the opportunity for a solo show, to retract her invitation, saying it would be unbefitting for the South’s first museum to showcase the work of a Black artist. When he wished to paint landscapes at Magnolia Gardens, he had to sneak in disguised as a worker. To see his paintings, one had to visit Harleston Studios on Calhoun Street, adjacent to Emanuel AME Church and across the street from the family business, Harleston Funeral Services (where Delaney Oyster House now is), which he and his wife, Elise, a photographer, helped run. Funds were perpetually tight, and Harleston often had to bury his artistic impulses while tending to the funeral business, but managed to find ways to travel to New York City, Atlanta, and Chicago to try to drum up portrait commissions, with limited success. …