Charleston Renaissance

The Charleston Renaissance is a period between World Wars I and II in which the city of Charleston, South Carolina, experienced a boom in the arts as artists, writers, architects, and historical preservationists came together to improve and represent their city. The Charleston Renaissance was related to the larger interwar artistic movement known as the Southern Renaissance and is credited with helping to spur the city's tourist industry.

In the pre-Civil-War era, Charleston was one of the ten largest cities in America. The war destroyed the city's prosperity, and the economic after-effects lingered through the Reconstruction era into the early 20th century. Beginning around World War I, however, the city experienced a renaissance in the arts as the local art community worked on bettering their city and representing it in various media. The Charleston Renaissance contributed to the rise of such art institutions as the Charleston Museum, the Gibbes Museum of Art (which grew out of the Carolina Art Association's gallery), and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. It lasted through the Great Depression until World War II.

Writers associated with the movement include DuBose Heyward (author of the book on which the opera Porgy and Bess was based), John Bennett (author of the first scholarly work on the Gullah language), novelists Josephine Pinckney and Julia Peterkin, poets Hervey Allen and Beatrice Ravenel, and playwright Dorothy Heyward.

On the institutional front, Laura Bragg became the first woman to run a publicly funded art museum in America when she became the director of the Charleston Museum.

The Charleston Renaissance is most closely associated with the visual arts, however. The four leading artists of the movement are Alfred Hutty, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Anna Heyward Taylor, and Elizabeth O'Neill Verner. Of these, Smith and Verner were Charleston natives, while Taylor hailed from elsewhere in the state and Hutty came from New York. Other visual artists considered part of the movement include Edwin Harleston and William Posey Silva. Visiting artists such as Ellen Day Hale, Gabrielle D. Clements, Edward Hopper, and Childe Hassam are sometimes included in the group.

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