Melvin Edwards is a pioneer in the history of contemporary African-American art.
He is celebrated for his distinctive sculptures and three-dimensional installations created from welded steel, barbed wire, chain and machine parts. While the artist's formal language clearly engages with the history of abstraction and modern sculpture, Edwards' 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.
In 1970, Edwards became 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.
He 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 the artist's 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.
Edwards was recently awarded the prestigious US Artists Fellowship 2020. He was born in 1937 in Houston, TX and currently lives and works just outside of New York City and Dakar, Senegal.
