Melvin Edwards

Melvin Edwards
Edwards in 2024
Born	Melvin Eugene Edwards, Jr. (1937-05-04) May 4, 1937 Houston, Texas, United States
Alma mater	University of Southern California (BFA)
Known for	Sculpture
Notable work	Lynch Fragments (1963–1966, 1973, 1978–present) Rockers (1970–present) Breaking of the Chains (1995) David's Dream (2023)
Spouse(s)	Karen Hamre ​ ​ (m. 1960, divorced)​ Jayne Cortez ​ ​ (m. 1975; died 2012)​

Melvin "Mel" Edwards (born May 4, 1937) is an American abstract sculptor, printmaker, and arts educator. Edwards, an African-American artist, was raised in segregated communities in Texas and an integrated community in Ohio. He moved to California in 1955, beginning his professional art career while an undergraduate student. Originally trained as a painter, Edwards began exploring sculpture and welding techniques in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, before moving again to New York in 1967.

Edwards is best known for his Lynch Fragments sculptures, a series of small, abstract steel assemblage sculptures made with spikes, scissors, chains, and other small metal objects welded together into wall reliefs, which he first began making in 1963. In addition to their titular reference to lynching, these works have been described by the artist as metaphors for the struggles and endurance of African Americans living in the United States.

He is also known for his minimalist sculptural environments built with strands of barbed wire and chain beginning in the late 1960s; his kinetic Rockers sculptures, painted metal works built on discs that can rock back and forth; and his monumental outdoor sculptures, often characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular, circular, and rectilinear metal forms. Edwards has also worked extensively in printmaking, beginning in college and continuing throughout his career. While Edwards' art is primarily abstract, his works often contain explicit references to African-American and African history as well as contemporary politics and events in their titles and underlying materials.

Edwards has mounted more than a dozen solo exhibitions in museums and galleries across the United States and internationally. In 1970, he was the first African-American artist to receive a solo show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Following a period of decline in attention from curators and critics in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s, Edwards' art was included in several high-profile national and international exhibitions in the 2000s and 2010s, leading to an increase in recognition of his work both within the art world and more broadly. Edwards has also taught art in several universities across the country, including a 30-year teaching career at Rutgers University, from which he retired in 2002. He lives and works between upstate New York, New Jersey, and Senegal.

He is currently the subject of a solo retrospective exhibition at the Fridericianum in Kassel, on view until February 9, 2025.

Early life and education

Melvin Eugene Edwards Jr. was born on May 4, 1937 in Houston, the eldest of four children born to Thelmarie Edwards and Melvin Edwards Sr. The family moved to McNair, Texas, in 1942 where Edwards started first grade, before moving again to Dayton, Ohio, in 1944 for Melvin Sr.'s job at the Boy Scouts of America. Edwards attended the racially integrated schools Wogoman Elementary and Irving Elementary in Dayton. He said that he first began to understand the concept of art after his fourth grade art teacher at Irving had the class practice figure drawing; while the other students drew cartoon figures of their classmate who was posing, Edwards noticed that his own drawing was a more realistic portrayal: "this was a revelation to me. It was a surprise... that that could be done." He often took trips with his family and school to the Dayton Art Institute.

In 1949 his family moved in with Edwards' grandmother in Houston, having returned to Texas for his father's new job with Houston Lighting & Power, though his parents divorced during his childhood. Edwards grew up in Houston during a time of racial segregation, attending E. O. Smith Junior High School and Phillis Wheatley High School. He began seriously making art at a young age, encouraged by both his parents and teachers; his father and a family friend built his first easel when he was 14 years old, and his father was himself an amateur painter. While attending high school, Edwards was one of two students selected from his school to take art classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; he was also introduced to abstract art by one of his high school teachers. He was also an avid athlete, playing football throughout high school. Having lived as a child in both nominally integrated and forcibly segregated communities, Edwards as an adult said that he had experience with both "the segregated laws of the South" as well as "the segregated customs of the North."

After graduating high school Edwards moved to Los Angeles in 1955, living with his aunt and uncle while working part-time to pay for courses at Los Angeles City College. While in college he worked a number of jobs, including at the post office, in a warehouse, and as a porter in a hospital. Edwards was interested in studying art but also wanted to continue his sports career, so he transferred to the University of Southern California (USC), to study and play football. His first period of study at USC was primarily focused on painting, and his professors included Francis de Erdely, Hans Burkhardt, Hal Gebhardt, and Edward Ewing, as well as the art historian Theresa Fulton. He then accepted a scholarship to attend the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design), studying under his first sculpture teachers Renzo Fenci and Joe Mugnaini, but he transferred back to USC after six months when he received a scholarship to return to play football. Edwards has said that he nearly failed one of his undergraduate history courses at USC after disagreeing with the professor's Eurocentric views of history. This inspired his later visits to Africa to learn about the history of the continent.

While attending USC, Edwards met fellow art student Karen Hamre; the two married in 1960 and Hamre gave birth to their first daughter, Ana, the same year. Edwards became friends with several other artists in Los Angeles, including Marvin Harden, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Ron Miyashiro, Ed Bereal, and David Novros. He met Charles White around this period as well, one of the best-known African-American artists of the era who had moved to Los Angeles in 1956; the actor Ivan Dixon eventually purchased one of Edwards' works as a gift for White. He also began spending time at Dwan Gallery, owned by Virginia Dwan, meeting well-known artists associated with minimalism and land art.

Edwards finished the majority of his undergraduate coursework by 1960, although he did not receive his degree until 1965, due to an uncompleted language course necessary for graduation.

Life and career

1960s

1960–1964: Early career, first Lynch Fragments

See also: Lynch Fragments

After finishing the majority of his studies at USC, Edwards asked graduate student and sculptor George Baker to teach him to weld. He took additional night classes with Baker in 1962 to learn more about the technique and process. He also found employment to help support his family, working in a ceramics factory owned by fellow USC graduate Tony Hill. Edwards was trained in specialized finishing techniques to complete the modernist ceramics produced in the factory. In addition, he eventually found work at a film production company owned by Novros' father. The company's office was located near June Wayne's Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now the Tamarind Institute), and he would visit the center on his lunch breaks, meeting influential national artists like George Sugarman, Richard Hunt, Leon Golub, and Louise Nevelson, as well as Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) print curator Riva Castleman. Living in Los Angeles, Edwards was also introduced to the work of a number of Mexican muralist artists including David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco, which he said inspired him to similarly draw on his own cultural background in his art to communicate his social and political views.

Edwards spent several years in the early 1960s experimenting with different welding techniques, eventually buying his own equipment and setting up a studio in a garage that Hill owned. In 1963, this experimentation resulted in a small relief sculpture titled Some Bright Morning, comprising a shallow cylindrical form accented by bits of steel, a blade-shaped triangle of steel, and a short chain hanging from the piece with a small lump of metal at its end. This work became the first in his Lynch Fragments series. Edwards said the title of the piece was a reference to a story from Ralph Ginzburg's anthology 100 Years of Lynchings, a compilation of reports on lynchings in the United States published the year prior. The named story relays the narrative of a black family in Florida successfully fighting back against their white neighbors who had threatened to come to the property on "some bright morning" in order to kill them. Inspired by developments in the Civil Rights Movement, these welded metal wall reliefs are usually small in size. Edwards has described the series as a metaphor for the struggles experienced by African Americans. He has employed a variety of metal objects to create these works, including hammer heads, scissors, locks, chains, and railroad spikes.

Edwards traveled to New York for the first time in 1963, visiting MoMA after having heard that it was possible to meet well-known artists working as guards. The first person he met at the museum was the artist William Majors, a member of the African-American art group Spiral. On his trip to the city he also met artist Hale Woodruff, another member of Spiral, and showed Woodruff several of his Lynch Fragments sculptures.

In the mid-1960s, Edwards began assisting Dwan Gallery with freelance repairs for sculptures and installations by several of the gallery's artists, including Jean Tinguely's mechanical sculptures; he also helped artist Mark di Suvero install a number of works alongside a highway in Los Angeles.

1965–1969: Rising recognition, move to New York, Smokehouse

His first one-person exhibition of sculpture was held in 1965 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He exhibited several of his Lynch Fragments sculptures, along with the first iteration of a work titled Chaino which consisted of a small metal assemblage suspended in midair with chains attached to the walls and a metal rod hanging from the ceiling; he later built a metal armature for Chaino so it could be displayed suspended without the need of a wall or ceiling rod. Writing in Artforum, critic David Gebhard positively reviewed the exhibition, saying that "Perfection of workmanship and a full understanding of material has been united with the formal content of each work." In 1965, he also began teaching at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts). His second and third children, twin daughters, were born the same year.

The Lifted X (1965) at the Museum of Modern Art.

Around this period he also began to create a new series of works comprising dense central assemblage forms suspended within various types of metal enclosures, similar to Chaino. He created several such works in 1965, including The Lifted X, named in honor of Malcolm X after his murder the same year; this piece consists of a large metal form with a meat hook hanging from its underside, lifted above a metal armature with an "X" formed by the bars on its base.

Edwards' work was included in the historical survey exhibition The Negro in American Art, organized by art historian James Porter at UCLA in 1966. Artist Sam Gilliam was also included in the exhibition, and the two became friends and colleagues after Edwards saw Gilliam's work. He visited New York again in 1966 to search for housing and studio space in the city for his family to relocate. On this trip he helped his friend Robert Grosvenor install a sculpture in the exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, which introduced Edwards to a broader group of artists working in minimalism.

Edwards moved to New York in January 1967, relocating with his wife and children. Johnson and Miyashiro, who had both themselves moved to the city from California, helped the family settle. He had been encouraged by other artists, Sugarman in particular, to move to New York in order to further his career and find more opportunities. He also made the decision to stop creating new sculptures for the Lynch Fragments series, deciding instead to focus on other, larger works. Edwards and Hamre decided to separate soon after they moved to New York, and she returned to California with their daughters; they divorced soon after. After moving to New York, Edwards secured a position teaching art in 1967 at Orange County Community College in the Hudson Valley north of the city.

He was soon introduced to the artist William T. Williams, meeting Williams at a party for Sugarman after the artist Al Held recommended they connect; they quickly became close friends and colleagues. Around this period Edwards also met the painter and writer Frank Bowling, another black abstract artist. Bowling quickly became a champion of Edwards' work in his criticism and painted a piece dedicated to Edwards in 1968, Mel Edwards Decides, a reference to Edwards' decision-making process for whether to participate in high-profile exhibitions thematically oriented around "black art".

He moved into a farmhouse in Orange County in the fall of 1968, living alone after his wife and children left New York. During this period he began developing a new series of barbed-wire sculptural installations. These works comprise strands of barbed wire and chain strung in different shapes and patterns from walls and ceilings in gallery spaces, extending into the room to form environments rather than discrete individual sculptures. That summer, Edwards participated in a residency at the Sabathani Community Center in Minneapolis, where he first began to create large painted metal sculptures; the Walker Art Center exhibited the works soon after, one of the museum's first exhibitions of public sculpture. These painted sculptures were made with bright, primary colors, a theme he was inspired to explore by Sugarman's work. Edwards then traveled to Los Angeles, to install a large solo exhibition at the Barnsdall Art Center, before returning to New York to join Williams and his new initiative, Smokehouse.

Smokehouse (also known as Smokehouse Associates) was a New York-based community wall-painting initiative developed by Williams; Edwards participated primarily during the summers of 1968 and 1969. The project was born from a desire shared by Williams and others to create participatory public art projects that could have a positive social effect on their communities. Smokehouse created a series of wall paintings consisting of hard-edge graphics and geometric patterns, designed and executed with local community members, all located along several streets in Harlem.

In early 1969, Edwards' friend from Los Angeles, Bob Rogers, suggested that he create illustrations for the poet Jayne Cortez' new poetry book. Edwards and Cortez had met briefly in California, but were reacquainted and became closer in New York after Edwards provided several drawings for Cortez' book Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man's Wares.

Edwards, Williams, and Gilliam exhibited their work together with Williams' former classmate Stephan Kelsey in June 1969 at the Studio Museum in Harlem for the exhibition X to the Fourth Power. Edwards showed the first of his barbed-wire installations, including Pyramid Up and Pyramid Down, a pyramidal form made with lengths of barbed wire stretched across a corner of the gallery. Edwards, Williams, and Gilliam, all African-American artists making abstract art, would go on to stage several additional exhibitions as a trio in the 1970s. At the time of the exhibition, some black artists, curators, and activists had begun to view art as a secondary concern to the needs of political developments like the rise of the black power movement, preferring art of the era that served an explicit functional purpose within a social movement rather than art made as aesthetic exploration or for non-political use, including abstract art, a debate that was ongoing within the Studio Museum itself. The works Edwards exhibited, along with those of his fellow artists, were explicitly non-representational and did not serve a political function; several reviews of the exhibition focused on this perceived tension.

In the fall of 1969, Bowling curated the exhibition 5+1 at SUNY Stony Brook featuring work by six black artists making abstract art: Edwards, Williams, Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and Bowling himself. Edwards exhibited the second of his barbed-wire installations, Curtain for William and Peter, a wall of strands of barbed wire hung from the ceiling that ran the entire length of the gallery and divided the space in two, named for Williams and the artist Peter Bradley.

Cornell University's Johnson Museum, with Edwards' sculpture Homage to My Father and the Spirit (1969) in the foreground

He also completed his first major public commission in 1969, the outdoor sculpture Homage to My Father and the Spirit, created for Cornell University's Johnson Museum. The sculpture comprises a large vertical stainless steel disc connected to a triangular panel of steel with a stepped outer edge painted orange, green, blue, and yellow.

1970s: Whitney exhibition, Rockers, travel to Africa

Installation view of Edwards' solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1970. At left is "look through minds mirror distance and measure time" (1970) and at right is Curtain for William and Peter (1969).

In March 1970, Edwards staged a solo exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum; he was the first African-American artist to receive a solo show in the museum's history. He installed two new barbed-wire installations: Corner for Ana, a set of horizontal barbed wires creating a triangle form in a corner, named for the artist's daughter; and "look through minds mirror distance and measure time", a tunnel-like installation named for a poem by Cortez. Additionally, he recreated Pyramid Up and Pyramid Down and Curtain for William and Peter for the show. His exhibition at the Whitney was negatively reviewed in Artforum by critic and art theorist Robert Pincus-Witten, who wrote that "Robert Morris has already accomplished" what he believed Edwards was attempting with his sculptures, and disagreed with the museum's supposed decision to "so obviously sponsor the career of a young artist," despite the fact that Edwards had been exhibiting on the west coast for several years. The following year Bowling published a defense of Edwards' show in ARTnews, responding directly to criticisms of Edwards' work, saying that critics had overlooked the signified meanings and multiple references in the sculptures: "[Edwards] reroutes fashion and current art convention to 'signify' something different to someone who grew up in Watts rather than to 'signify' only in the meaning of Jack Burnham and his colleagues." Although the show was not widely positively reviewed, artist David Hammons attended the exhibition and later said the barbed-wire sculptures had inspired his own work: "That was the first abstract piece of art that I saw that had cultural value in it for black people."

In 1970, Edwards also began work on his Rockers series, kinetic sculptures built on rounded half-discs that can rock back and forth. Edwards said the series was inspired by his grandmother Coco's rocking chair; Edwards had injured himself on the chair as a child, holding onto the memory into adulthood. Edwards used the term "syncopate" to describe the interaction while rocking, and the relationship of syncopation in African-American music. The first work in the series, Homage to Coco, completed in 1970, comprised two painted half-circles of steel connected by crossbars, with a series of steel chains running between the forms which swung as the work rocked. He originally sketched the work to include barbed wire instead of chains but executed the change after receiving the components from his fabricator. Homage to Coco was first shown at the Whitney Museum's annual sculpture exhibition several months after Edwards' solo exhibition at the museum. He was also appointed to an assistant professorship at the University of Connecticut the same year.

In the summer of 1970, Edwards took his first trip to Africa, visiting the West African republics of Nigeria, Togo, Benin, and Ghana. He traveled with the program "Educators to Africa," accompanied by Cortez and a group comprised mostly of African-American teachers. After his first trip in 1970, he traveled with Cortez to different parts of Africa many times throughout the coming decades, saying in 1987 that "I go every chance I get - I've probably been back to Africa more times since 1970 than I've been to Texas." He has spoken extensively about the influence of his time in Africa on his work, noting in particular his experiences in the early 1970s in the Nigerian city of Ibadan. Edwards found a large creative community in Ibadan, meeting and becoming friends with the artist Demas Nwoko and writer Lindsay Barrett. While in Benin, he was trained in bronze casting by Chief Moregbe Inneh, a leader of the country's bronze casters.

In 1972, he accepted a position as an assistant professor at Rutgers University's Livingston College. The same year, Edwards, Gilliam, and Williams mounted a three-person exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, titled Interconnections. As an undergraduate, Edwards studied printmaking techniques but had largely stopped working in the medium after university; in 1973, he was encouraged to start making prints again by printmaker Robert Blackburn, and he made several works in Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop in New York's East Village.

In 1973, Edwards also briefly returned to making new Lynch Fragments sculptures, spurred by pro-segregationist protests in parts of New York and attacks on black people in his neighborhood, although he quit making new works for the series by the end of the year. He did show them in several exhibitions over the following years; in 1974, he exhibited multiple new works from the series in a three-person show with Gilliam and Williams, Extensions, at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Edwards and Cortez married in 1975.

Edwards staged another three-person exhibition with Gilliam and Williams in 1976, Resonance, at Morgan State University in Baltimore. He showed several works with titles referencing his travels to and study of Africa, including Angola 1973 and Luanda 1975. Edwards participated in FESTAC (the Second World Black and African Festival Arts and Culture) in Lagos in 1977. Edwards traveled with Cortez to Nigeria for the event and they stayed together with all the other participants in the same residential complex, allowing them to meet and engage with a large number of artists from the African diaspora, an experience Edwards said was "more than exciting – it was important."

The Studio Museum in Harlem hosted Edwards' first retrospective exhibition in 1978, which included a set of his Lynch Fragments sculptures, works from his Rockers series, and a large steel work dedicated to the recently deceased poet Léon-Gontran Damas, whom Edwards had met via Cortez. Damas, a key figure in the founding of the Négritude intellectual movement, had asked Edwards to create a work for his home but passed away before it was completed; Edwards exhibited it in partial form at the Studio Museum and finished it over the ensuing three years. The retrospective received very little critical attention; the director of the museum, Mary Schmidt Campbell, said that "It was like nothing, like the show didn't happen... It was scary." The exhibition offered Edwards the opportunity to see several Lynch Fragments sculptures together after several years, inspiring him to restart the series and continue creating new works throughout his career.

In 1978, he also began serving as the American editor of Nwoko's art-focused journal New Culture, writing extensively about African-American art for a Nigerian audience and publishing images of his own sculptures and illustrations.

1980s: Public sculpture, critical lull

In 1980, Edwards became a full professor at Rutgers' Mason Gross School of the Arts. In 1981, Edwards traveled with Cortez to Cuba on a trip organized by the artist Ana Mendieta, giving a lecture to the Casa de las Américas about African-American art and meeting several well-known Cuban artists including Wifredo Lam. He made a sculpture in Lam's memory upon his death the following year.

He mounted a two-decade survey of his sculptures at the Maison de l'UNESCO in Paris, in 1984. He showed a large number of newer Lynch Fragments sculptures, including the newest, At Cross Roads, made that year, which contained a metal vise etched with a company logo and a made in USA marking, among other materials.

Edwards continued to produce new work throughout the 1980s, but his career in New York faltered somewhat, with fewer exhibitions or high-profile commissions in the city. Curator Lowery Stokes Sims, a supporter of Edwards' work, attributed this to both the artist's choice to pursue abstract art as a black artist at a time when figurative art was considered by some to hold more political value, and to the subject matter of his Lynch Fragments sculptures, which Sims said was "tough stuff for the art world to take in." In 1988, critic Michael Brenson called Edwards "one of the best American sculptors", as well as "one of the least known". The following year, Brenson profiled Edwards and several other black artists in The New York Times, writing that, despite a broad array of awards, exhibitions, and commissions across the country, Edwards "remains largely unknown."

In 1989, Edwards completed an outdoor sculpture commission at the Social Security Administration building in Queens as part of the GSA's federal Art in Architecture program, one of seven commissions by African-American artists for the building. His sculpture Confirmation, installed in a public plaza in front of the building, was made with a series of large stainless steel geometric forms including a disc, a triangle, and an arch.

1990s: First commercial show, 30-year retrospective

Edwards continued making Lynch Fragments sculptures throughout the 1980s, exhibiting many of them in a ten-year survey of his work at Montclair State College in 1990. He also opened his first ever solo commercial gallery exhibition in 1990 at CDS Gallery in New York, exhibiting seventeen Lynch Fragments sculptures and a large freestanding stainless steel work, To Listen, comprising several tall door-like elements with an oversized length of chain running up the side of the piece. Sculptures from the exhibition were purchased by a number of museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and MoMA. The owner of the gallery, Clara Diament Sujo, told ARTnews that it was somewhat difficult to sell Edwards' Lynch Fragments sculptures to private collectors despite a large number of museum acquisitions, saying "they don't hide their nature. Their confrontation is a dramatic one." Speaking in 1990 about his lack of commercial success in the immediate years following his Whitney Museum exhibition, Edwards said "I certainly thought that around the time when I did my show at the Whitney [...] something else significant should have happened. But when it didn't, I just kept on working."

In 1993, Edwards staged a 30-year retrospective exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. Reviewing the exhibition for the Times, critic Michael Kimmelman wrote that Edwards "conformed to the canons of neither figuration nor formalist abstraction, which may partly explain why his art tended to fall between art world stools and why [...] he has had to wait so long for a museum to give him such serious attention." The same year he was invited to present work at the first Fujisankei Biennale Sculpture Competition in Japan, exhibiting Asafo Kra No, a large outdoor painted steel work with a chain and a rocking element; the sculpture won the grand prize of the competition.

2000s: Retirement from teaching, time in Senegal

Edwards and Cortez began living part time in Dakar in 2000, with Edwards securing studio space to make work there. Living in Senegal, he began to make new works similar in style to his Lynch Fragments sculptures, but with the addition of metal drainage covers commonly used in the region, onto which he mounted the assemblage forms. Edwards retired from his long-time position teaching at Rutgers in 2002. He and Cortez purchased a larger property in upstate New York around the same time.

In 2008, he completed Transcendence, a monumental sculpture commissioned for the campus of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. The work, made of a series of stainless steel geometric forms and chain links stacked atop one another, is dedicated to the self-emancipated 19th-century ophthalmologist David K. McDonogh, who had been sent to Lafayette by his enslaver in 1838 to be educated for a missionary voyage to Liberia but had refused to be sent to Africa, instead graduating from the university and starting a long medical career in New York.

2010s: 50-year retrospective, Venice Biennale

In the fall of 2010, Edwards staged an exhibition of new and historical works at the gallery Alexander Gray Associates in New York, showing multiple newer Lynch Fragments sculptures with titles referencing contemporary events including the Iraq War. He also exhibited a number of older works like Chaino (1970). Several critics positively reviewed the exhibition, including Roberta Smith, writing in The New York Times, who said the exhibition showed "the quiet, undiminished integrity of Mr. Edwards’s art..."

Several of Edwards' Lynch Fragments sculptures were included in the Hammer Museum's exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 in fall 2011 in L.A., which eventually traveled to MoMA PS1 in New York. Edwards' inclusion in the exhibition led to an increase in critical reappraisals of his oeuvre and a new awareness of his work among a younger group of curators. In June 2012, he restaged his barbed-wire sculpture Pyramid Up and Pyramid Down (1969) at the Art Basel art fair for Gray's gallery.

The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas opened a 50-year retrospective of Edwards' work in January 2015, comprising work from every era of his career. One gallery in the exhibition included a complete reinstallation of the artist's barbed-wire sculptures from his 1970 Whitney Museum exhibition. The curator, Catherine Craft, said she became interested in working with Edwards on a show after seeing his works in Now Dig This. After closing in Texas, the exhibition traveled to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio.

Edwards' work was included in the 56th Venice Biennale in May 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition's first African curator. Enwezor installed a series of Edwards' Lynch Fragments sculptures in two rows on walls facing each other that visitors had to walk between. Edwards' inclusion in the Biennale led to another increase in critical attention on his career.

Edwards traveled to Oklahoma in 2016 for a monthlong residency at the Oklahoma Contemporary, sourcing materials from local scrapyards to create new works, including several sculptures made with metal forms suspended in the air with chains. He showed many of these new pieces in 2017 at Gray's gallery in New York in his exhibition In Oklahoma. Also in 2017, Edwards mounted a solo exhibition at Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery, showing historical works as well as several recently completed pieces. Among the new works was Corner for Ana (Scales of Injustice), an installation work featuring a scale holding metal detritus, hanging behind a barrier of barbed wire; Edwards said the work was inspired by the death of a Gambian migrant who drowned in Venice's Grand Canal while onlookers filmed the incident instead of assisting.

In 2018, the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) hosted a survey of Edwards' Lynch Fragments sculptures, the most comprehensive exhibition of the series ever. The following year, Edwards returned to Brazil for a residency and exhibition at the art space Auroras in São Paulo; despite only being in Brazil for two weeks, he created a sizable body of new work, including the room-sized installation piece Continuous Resistance Room, the barbed-wire installation Curtain Calls, and six new Lynch Fragments works. After being shown at Auroras in 2019, the exhibition of new works traveled to the Museu da República in Rio de Janeiro and the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia.

Throughout the 2010s, a large number of museums and arts institutions purchased Edwards' work as critical interest in his career grew along with an increase in museum exhibitions. Speaking in 2019 about this new attention, he said "Some is serious, some is fickle and some is not at all positive — you just have to find your way through it". He also began experimenting with creating tapestries during this period.

2020s: Public sculpture survey, European retrospective

In 2021, Edwards staged the first survey of his outdoor sculptures, exhibited in New York's City Hall Park and organized by the Public Art Fund. He exhibited six of his large outdoor works, including the first work from his Rockers series, Homage to Coco (1970), along with several sculptures comprising oversized broken chain links. The Dia Art Foundation opened a long-term installation at Dia Beacon in 2022 of Edwards' barbed-wire sculptures from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The sculptures exhibited had never been executed before, only existing in sketch form.

Edwards staged his first solo museum exhibition in Europe in 2024 at the Fridericianum in Kassel. The retrospective exhibition, Some Bright Mornings, included a number of his Lynch Fragments sculptures, several large freestanding metal sculptures, and an array of drawings, prints, and paintings on paper from the 1970s and 80s.

Personal life

Edwards met fellow art student Karen Hamre while the two were undergraduates at the University of Southern California. They married in 1960 and had three children: Ana (b. 1960), and twins Margit and Allma (b. 1965). Shortly after moving to New York in 1967, the couple separated, with Hamre and the children returning to Los Angeles; Edwards and Hamre divorced soon after.

In 1969, Edwards was reintroduced to the poet Jayne Cortez, whom he had briefly met in Los Angeles, and the two became close after he provided illustrations for a book of her poetry. The couple married in 1975; Cortez passed away in 2012.

Edwards and Cortez moved to upstate New York in the early 2000s and began living part time in Dakar, Senegal. He maintains art studios in Accord, New York, Plainfield, New Jersey, and Dakar.

Edwards has cited jazz music as an influence on his work.

Public art

Edwards has completed a broad array of large-scale, public sculpture commissions. His public sculptures include: Homage to My Father and the Spirit (1969), installed at Cornell University's Appel Commons; Homage to Billie Holiday and the Young Ones of Soweto (1976–1977), installed at Morgan State University's James E. Lewis Museum of Art; Out of the Struggles of the Past to a Brilliant Future (1982), installed at Mt. Vernon Plaza apartment complex in Columbus, Ohio; Breaking of the Chains (1995), installed on San Diego harbor-front's Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade; and David's Dream (2023), installed outside the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Exhibitions

Edwards has participated in a large number of solo shows in the United States and internationally. His notable solo shows include: Melvin Edwards (1965) at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, his first solo museum exhibition; Melvin Edwards (1970), his first solo museum exhibition in New York and the first solo show by an African-American sculptor at New York's Whitney Museum; Melvin Edwards (1990) at CDS Gallery in New York, his first solo commercial gallery exhibition; Melvin Edwards: Sculptures 1964-2010 (2010) at Alexander Gray Associates in New York; and Melvin Edwards (2022), a long-term installation of previously unrealized sculptural installations at Dia Beacon.

He has staged numerous museum retrospective exhibitions, including: Melvin Edwards: Sculptor (1978), his first retrospective exhibition, a small show at the Studio Museum in Harlem; a 30-year traveling retrospective in 1993, originating at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York; a 50-year traveling retrospective in 2015, originating at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas; and Some Bright Mornings (2024), his first museum retrospective in Europe, at the Fridericianum in Kassel.

He has also participated in many group exhibitions, including the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and the Havana Biennial (2019).

Awards and honors

• 1975 – awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
• 1984 – grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
• 1988 – Fulbright Fellowship to Zimbabwe from 1988 to 1989.
• 1992 – elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate, and became a full Academician in 1994.
• He received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) in 2014.
• He is the subject of the 2016 documentary film by Lydie Diakhaté, entitled Some Bright Morning: The Art of Melvin Edwards.

Notable works in public collections

• August the Squared Fire (1965), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• The Lifted X (1965), Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Curtain for William and Peter (1969), Tate, London
• Pyramid Up and Pyramid Down (1969, refabricated 2017), Whitney Museum, New York
• Justice for Tropic-Ana (dedicated to Ana Mendieta) (1986), from the series Lynch Fragments, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
• Good Word from Cayenne (1990), from the series Lynch Fragments, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
• Off and Gone (1992), from the series Lynch Fragments, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
• Tambo (1993), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
• Siempre Gilberto de la Nuez (1994), from the series Lynch Fragments, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• Soba (2002), from the series Lynch Fragments, Detroit Institute of Arts
• Scales of Injustice (2017/year of exhibition), Baltimore Museum of Art

Publications

• Edwards, Melvin (1982). "Lynch Fragments". In Buhle, Paul; et al. (eds.). Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination. San Francisco: City Lights Books. pp. 95–96. ISBN 9780872861282. OCLC 8629174.
• Edwards, Melvin (January–February 2020). "Object Lessons: Melvin Edwards". Sculpture. Vol. 39, no. 1. p. 104. OCLC 14039712.

See also

• List of African-American visual artists

Notes, citations, and references

Cited references

• Pincus-Witten, Robert (May 1970). "Melvin Edwards". Artforum. Vol. 8, no. 9. p. 77. OCLC 20458258. Archived from the original on November 20, 2023. Retrieved December 16, 2024.
• Bowling, Frank (April 1971). "It's Not Enough to Say 'Black Is Beautiful'". ARTnews. OCLC 2392716. Archived from the original on November 1, 2023. Retrieved December 18, 2024.
• Baranik, Rudolf (November–December 1985). "The Steel Won't Be So Heavy". Art Papers. Vol. 9, no. 6. pp. 20–23. OCLC 7219444.
• Brenson, Michael (March 12, 1989). "ART VIEW; Black Artists: A Place in the Sun". The New York Times. sec. 2, p. 1. OCLC 1645522. Archived from the original on August 7, 2023. Retrieved December 21, 2024.
• Wallach, Amei (April 10, 1989). "Art With A Wallop". Newsday. Nassau and Suffolk edition. part II, pp. 4–5. OCLC 5371847.
• Brenson, Michael (1993). "Lynch Fragments". In Gedeon, Lucinda H. (ed.). Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, 1963–1993 (Exhibition catalogue). Purchase, New York / Seattle: Neuberger Museum of Art / University of Washington Press. pp. 20–33. ISBN 9780295973005. OCLC 28161746.
• Gear, Josephine (1993). "Melvin Edwards' Freestanding Sculpture". In Gedeon, Lucinda H. (ed.). Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, 1963–1993 (Exhibition catalogue). Purchase, New York / Seattle: Neuberger Museum of Art / University of Washington Press. pp. 87–92. ISBN 9780295973005. OCLC 28161746.
• Kenny, Lynne (1993). "Chronology". In Gedeon, Lucinda H. (ed.). Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, 1963–1993 (Exhibition catalogue). Purchase, New York / Seattle: Neuberger Museum of Art / University of Washington Press. pp. 129–139. ISBN 9780295973005. OCLC 28161746.
• Sims, Lowery Stokes (1993). "Melvin Edwards: An Artist's Life and Philosophy". In Gedeon, Lucinda H. (ed.). Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, 1963–1993 (Exhibition catalogue). Purchase, New York / Seattle: Neuberger Museum of Art / University of Washington Press. pp. 9–19. ISBN 9780295973005. OCLC 28161746.
• Gregg, Gail (February 1995). "Poetry in Heavy Metal" (PDF). ARTnews. Vol. 95, no. 2. pp. 104–107. OCLC 2392716. Archived (PDF) from the original on September 15, 2015. Retrieved December 16, 2024.
• Binstock, Jonathan P., ed. (2005). "Discarding the Frame". Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective (Exhibition catalogue). Berkeley, California / Washington, D.C.: University of California Press / Corcoran Gallery of Art. pp. 43–81. ISBN 9780520246454. OCLC 58594996.
• Craft, Catherine (January 2014). "Barbed Abstraction". Art in America. Vol. 102, no. 1. pp. 71–75. OCLC 1121298647. EBSCOhost 93672129.
• Arnold, Leigh A. (2015). "Catalogue of Public Sculptures". In Craft, Catherine (ed.). Melvin Edwards: Five Decades (Exhibition catalogue). Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center. pp. 180–189. ISBN 9780991233830. OCLC 904049795.
• Craft, Catherine, ed. (2015). Melvin Edwards: Five Decades (Exhibition catalogue). Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center. ISBN 9780991233830. OCLC 904049795.
• Potts, Alex (2015). "Melvin Edwards' Sculptural Intensity". In Craft, Catherine (ed.). Melvin Edwards: Five Decades (Exhibition catalogue). Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center. pp. 46–57. ISBN 9780991233830. OCLC 904049795.
• Wofford, Tobias (2015). "Reconsidering Black Internationalism". In Craft, Catherine (ed.). Melvin Edwards: Five Decades (Exhibition catalogue). Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center. pp. 60–71. ISBN 9780991233830. OCLC 904049795.
• Godfrey, Mark (May 2015). "Melvin Edwards and Frank Bowling in Dallas". Artforum. Vol. 53, no. 9. OCLC 20458258. Archived from the original on September 1, 2024. Retrieved December 18, 2024.
• Marter, Joan (May 2016). "Melvin Edwards: Liberation and Remembrance". Sculpture. Vol. 35, no. 4. pp. 44–49. OCLC 14039712.
• Irbouh, Hamid (2018). "Melvin Edwards' Lynch Fragments: Negritude and the Battle for Civil Rights in America". In Pedrosa, Adriano; Moura, Rodrigo (eds.). Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments (Exhibition catalogue). São Paulo Museum of Art. pp. 30–42. ISBN 9788531000515. OCLC 1061526860.
• Moura, Rodrigo (2018). "Lynch Fragments: Pieces of Life, Shards of History". In Pedrosa, Adriano; Moura, Rodrigo (eds.). Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments (Exhibition catalogue). Translated by Jojima, Tie. São Paulo Museum of Art. pp. 8–13. ISBN 9788531000515. OCLC 1061526860.
• Wolff, Rebecca (2018). "'Nigeria Is Okay with Me!': Memory and History in Ibadan Oke (1992) and Ile Ogun (2003)". In Pedrosa, Adriano; Moura, Rodrigo (eds.). Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments (Exhibition catalogue). São Paulo Museum of Art. pp. 22–29. ISBN 9788531000515. OCLC 1061526860.
• Godfrey, Mark (2019). "Abstraction in Tryin' Times, 1967-1980". In Martin, Courtney J. (ed.). Four Generations: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co. pp. 93–109. ISBN 9781941366264. OCLC 1104920240.
• Booker, Eric, ed. (2022). "Smokehouse: Abstract Potential". Smokehouse Associates. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem. pp. 7–38. ISBN 9780300267204. OCLC 1309868119.

Further reading

Articles and reviews

• Morejón, Nancy (Winter 1994). "Melvin Edwards: The World of a Marvelous Artist". The Black Scholar. Vol. 24, no. 1, Black Cultural History. Translated by Alegría, Carmen. The Black World Foundation. pp. 47–50. JSTOR 41068458. OCLC 1536543.
• Patton, Sharon (Winter 1994). "Melvin Edwards Sculptor of the African-American Ethos". The Black Scholar. Vol. 24, no. 1, Black Cultural History. The Black World Foundation. pp. 51–55. JSTOR 41068459. OCLC 1536543.
• Fite-Wassilak, Chris (March 2015). "Melvin Edwards". ArtReview. Vol. 67, no. 2. OCLC 557734373. Archived from the original on January 19, 2022. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
• Yau, John (September 6, 2015). "Will Some Bright Morning Ever Arrive?". Hyperallergic. OCLC 881810209. Archived from the original on September 6, 2015. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
• Diakhaté, Lydie (Winter–Spring 2016). "Melvin Edwards: The Poetics of the Blacksmith". Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. Vol. 16, no. 1. pp. 130–142. OCLC 34971120. ProQuest 1799217500.
• Colpitt, Frances (August 11, 2016). "Melvin Edwards: Five Decades". CAA.reviews. College Art Association. OCLC 51303802. Archived from the original on May 30, 2024. Retrieved December 22, 2024.
• Kee, Joan (March 2020). "Corroborators in Arms: The Early Works of Melvin Edwards and Ron Miyashiro". Oxford Art Journal. 43 (1). Oxford University Press: 49–74. doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcz026. OCLC 54857465.
• Archias, Elise (2023). Speaks, Elyse; Richmond, Susan (eds.). "In Defense of Interiority: Melvin Edwards' Early Work". Arts. 12 (6). Basel: MDPI: 247. doi:10.3390/arts12060247.
• Siegel, Harmon (Summer 2023). "Melvin Edwards". Artforum. Vol. 61, no. 10. OCLC 20458258. ProQuest 2833022385. Archived from the original on April 1, 2024. Retrieved December 16, 2024.
• Brenson, Michael (May–June 2024). "Melvin Edwards: 'You don't play around with that power'". Sculpture. Vol. 43, no. 3. pp. 60–71. OCLC 14039712.

Books

• Jassan, Alejandro, ed. (2019). Melvin Edwards: Painted Sculpture. New York: Alexander Gray Associates. ISBN 9780578604220. OCLC 1137340955.

Interviews

• Edwards, Melvin (November 24, 2014). "An Oral History with Melvin Edwards by Michael Brenson". BOMB Magazine Oral History Project (Interview). Interviewed by Brenson, Michael. Bomb. OCLC 61313615. Archived from the original on November 26, 2024. Retrieved December 15, 2024.
• Edwards, Melvin (2015). "Conversations with Melvin Edwards". Melvin Edwards: Five Decades (Interview). Interviewed by Craft, Catherine. Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center. ISBN 9780991233830. OCLC 904049795. Archived from the original on December 15, 2024. Retrieved December 19, 2024.
• Edwards, Melvin (February 2015). "Melvin Edwards". Surface (Interview). No. 115. Interviewed by Kim, Dave. OCLC 35964951. Archived from the original on March 3, 2024.
• Edwards, Melvin (March 9, 2015). "Melvin Edwards". Artforum (Interview). Interviewed by Campbell, Andy. OCLC 20458258. Archived from the original on September 28, 2023.
• Edwards, Melvin (October 5, 2017). "Chains of Love". frieze (Interview). Interviewed by Teasdale, Paul. OCLC 32711926. Archived from the original on February 26, 2019. Retrieved December 22, 2024.
• Williams, William T. (February 19, 2018). "William T. Williams by Mona Hadler". BOMB Magazine Oral History Project (Interview). Interviewed by Hadler, Mona. Bomb. OCLC 61313615. Archived from the original on June 5, 2024. Retrieved May 6, 2020.
• Edwards, Melvin (2019). "Entrevista com Melvin Edwards" [Interview with Melvin Edwards] (PDF). Melvin Edwards (Interview) (in Portuguese and English). Interviewed by Kugelmas, Ricardo. Translated by Mandruzato, Henrique Casimiro. São Paulo: Auroras. ISBN 9788593970023. OCLC 1128027734. Archived (PDF) from the original on June 16, 2024. Retrieved December 23, 2024.
• Edwards, Melvin (November 2019). "Melvin Edwards with Choghakate Kazarian". The Brooklyn Rail (Interview). Interviewed by Kazarian, Choghakate. OCLC 64199099. Archived from the original on November 10, 2019. Retrieved December 22, 2024.
• Edwards, Melvin; Gilliam, Sam; Williams, William T. (March 31, 2022). "Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam and William T. Williams: Abstract Artists and Old Friends". T: The New York Times Style Magazine (Interview). Interviewed by Bradley, Adam. OCLC 994775595. Archived from the original on March 31, 2022. Retrieved December 19, 2024.
• Edwards, Melvin (2023). "Melvin Edwards: A Life in Sculpture". Getty Trust Oral History Project (Interview). Interviewed by Campbell, Andrianna; Farrell, Shanna. Berkeley, California: Bancroft Library Oral History Center. OCLC 1440092407.

External links

• "No. 170: Melvin Edwards, Gohar Dashti" (February 2015). The Modern Art Notes Podcast.
• "Melvin Edwards: Five Decades" (March 29, 2016). Broad and High. WOSU-FM. via YouTube.