Banner Image: Detail of Edwin and Elise Harleston, View From Magnolia's White Bridge (c. 1926).

Art historian Connor Hamm will present the lecture “Mastering the Plantation: The Landscapes of Edwin and Elise Harleston.”

Lecture Abstract

In the late 1920s, married artists Edwin and Elise Harleston -- who operated the only Black-owned portrait studio in Charleston, South Carolina -- began to create landscapes of the city's plantation-gardens, most notably of Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. Seemingly picturesque, artworks like the panoramic photograph View From Magnolia's White Bridge (c. 1926) and the oil painting Magnolia Gardens (c. 1929) imbue the Southern landscape with critical subtext and reimagine the plantation into a space of Black possibility. Despite official attributions solely crediting Edwin Harleston, this presentation makes the case for Elise Harleston's involvement in the couple's landscape practice. This study represents the first attempt to take seriously her role in the Harleston Studio and attend to the significance of the Harlestons' little-known landscapes, and in so doing, contributes to growing discourse on Black artists from the period working outside the Harlem Renaissance and to broader efforts to expand the canon of modern American art. 

Lecturer Bio

Connor Hamm teaches in the Art History Department at Georgia State University and researches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and visual culture. Influenced by social histories of art, his research interests include the visual politics of representation; art of the US South; and comparative, transatlantic modernisms. His latest project examines the often-overlooked legacies of Black-owned portrait studios in the Jim Crow South and the larger post-slavery Americas. He has received fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Henry Luce Foundation, and has written for publications such as Art in America and the Brooklyn Rail.