M. Akua McDaniel In Conversation with Dr. Amalia Amaki

M. Akua McDaniel, Ph.D., is a retired associate professor of art history and former chair of Spelman College’s Department of Art and Art History. She has also taught at Roosevelt University, Loyola University, and the Art Institute of Chicago. McDaniel earned her BFA and MFA from Ohio University and completed her Ph.D. in late 19th early 20th century American art and culture at Emory University’s Institute of Liberal Arts. In her role as founding director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, she received a certificate in Museum Collection Care and Management from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and was awarded a fellowship to attend the Museums in the 21st Century Seminar in Salzburg, Austria. During her time at Spelman, Dr. McDaniel not only taught art history courses but she has also published widely on topics related to African American art, including her latest book, A Dream Deferred: The Art and Activism of Edwin Augustus Harleston.

For more than twenty years, she has contributed to the arts community in numerous capacities, including as visual arts coordinator and curator for the National Black Arts Festival, member of the art selection committee for Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport Terminal, and panelist for both the Georgia Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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.

Amaki attended Georgia State University and majored in journalism and psychology. In 1970, she won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Feature Writing and was the first and only African American on campus to join this journalism organization. Amaki’s art captures the lives of African women of the Diaspora through media from everyday life (photography, quilts, buttons, boxes and household items). Her work redefines the lives of past and present African American heroines and heroes and contrasts their depiction in the mainstream media She has published a number of articles including “Art: The Paul Jones Collection in Art” and Everyday Life: The Paul Jones Collection, an exhibition catalog by the Marietta-Cobb Museum of Art, Marietta, Georgia in 1999.

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