Wielding materials such as steel, barbed wire and machine parts, Melvin Edwards creates abstract sculptures and three-dimensional installations that investigate themes of social injustice, race and protest. He is considered a significant figure in the history of contemporary African-American art.
Read MoreThe artist currently works and lives in New York and New Jersey in the United States, and Dakar in Senegal.
Melvin Edwards was born in Houston, Texas in 1937. In 1955, Edwards moved to Los Angeles to study at City College. He eventually transferred to the University of Southern California where he learned to paint, draw and weld. In between semesters, Edwards studied sculpture at the Los Angeles County Art Institute under the tutorship of Italian sculptor Renzo Fenci.
By the early 1960s, Edwards had moved into his own studio and began to focus solely on welding abstract sculptures. In 1965, he graduated from the University of Southern California with a BFA and was invited to show work in his first solo exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
In 1970, Melvin Edwards became the first Black sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In this series of work, Edwards welds together disparate scraps of found metal to create new art objects that investigate narratives of violence, oppression and creation.
The artist began Lynch Fragments (1963—Present) after finding inspiration in the socially-engaged practices of modernist sculptors Julio González and David Smith.
The Lynch Fragments series extends across three important periods of the artist's life. Beginning in the 1960s, Edwards created sculptures in response to the racial violence occurring throughout the United States. By the 1970s, Edwards' focus turned to the Vietnam War protests. Finally, from 1978 to present, the artist's series looks to nostalgia and an exploration into Edwards' interest in African culture and his own African heritage.
Each sculpture fuses metal objects such as nails, chains, spikes, bolts and hammers to create a threatening abstract form. Edwards' tangles of welded scraps refer to the history of brutality, violence and intense physical labour of the black body.
Edwards is a firm supporter of public art. He has contributed public sculptures to museums, universities and public housing projects since the 1960s.
Public commissions include Homage to My Father and the Spirit (1969) at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca; Holder of the Light (1985) at Lafayette Gardens, Jersey City; and Asafo Kra No (1993) at the Utsukushi-Ga-Hara Open-Air Museum, Nagano Prefecture, Japan.
Smokehouse (1968—70) was a New York City collective that helped to transform neighbourhoods by installing sculptures and painting murals on city walls. Edwards and artists William T. Williams, Guy Ciarcia and Billy Rose cleaned up sites around the city and actively engaged with members of different neighbourhoods to employ teenagers and elders who assisted during production.
Smokehouse used the transformative power of public art to enhance the value of contemporary urban life by creating an artist platform for the community, by the community.
In 2020, Edwards was awarded the United States Artists Fellowship in Chicago. Edwards' work has been featured in several Biennales including the Venice Biennale, Italy in 2015 and the Marrakech Biennale, Morocco in 2016.
Edwards has presented work in a number of retrospective exhibitions including Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective 1963—1993 at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York (1993); and Melvin Edwards: Five Decades at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas (2015).
Melvin Edwards' works are featured in many collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Melvin Edwards had exhibited widely.
Select solo exhibitions include Brighter Days, City Hall Park, New York (2021); Melvin Edwards, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2020); Melvin Edwards: Crossroads, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2019—20); Melvin Edwards: The Sculptor of Resistance, Auroras Gallery, São Paulo (2019); Painted Sculpture, Alexander Gray Associates, New York (2019); Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments, MASP, São Paulo (2018); and Melvin Edwards, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2017).
Select group exhibitions include Epistrophy, Pace Gallery, New York (2022); Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York (2021); Kalunga, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2021); Museum for Preventive Imagination — Editorial, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO), Rome (2020—22); Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991—2011, MoMA PS1, New York (2019—20); and African American Art in the 20th Century, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. (2019—22).
Melvin Edwards is represented by Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, Cologne and New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery in London.
Melvin Edwards representative gallery website can be found here.
Phoebe Bradford | Ocula | 2022
