Overview
A pioneer in the history of contemporary African-American art, Melvin Edwards is celebrated for his distinctive sculptures and three-dimensional installations created from welded steel, barbed wire, chain and machine parts.
A pioneer in the history of contemporary African-American art, Melvin Edwards is celebrated for his distinctive sculptures and three-dimensional installations created from welded steel, barbed wire, chain and machine parts.
Melvin Edwards was born in 1937 in Houston, USA. He lives and works just outside of New York, USA and in Dakar, Senegal.
While Edwards’ formal language clearly engages with the history of abstraction and modern sculpture, his work is born out of the social and political turmoil of the civil rights movement in the United States. Themes of race, protest and social injustice permeate the artist’s practice.
Edwards’ career began in southern California with a solo exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1965. In 1970, he went on to become the first African-American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, presenting a ground-breaking installation of work made from barbed wire. Toying with the duplicity of meaning and contradictions embedded in objects, he states in the accompanying catalogue:
"I have always understood the brutalist connotations inherent in materials like barbed wire and links of chain and my creative thoughts have always anticipated the beauty of utilizing that necessary complexity which arises from the use of these materials in what could be called a straight formalist style."
The artist is perhaps best known for his ‘Lynch Fragments' series. Inspired by the practices of modernists such as Julio González and David Smith, the series spans three distinct periods from Edwards’ life; the 1960s, during which work evolved in response to racial violence in the United States; the 1970s, in protest against the Vietnam War; and from 1978 to the present, during which work for the artist became a vehicle to honour individuals, consider nostalgia and explore his interest in African culture and artefacts. Both the materials – metal objects such as hammers and chisels forged together – and the titles of individual works refer to hard physical labour and the history of brutality against the black body.
