Mel Edwards

Mel Edwards (born 1937) is an American sculptor, based in New York City He has had more than a dozen one-person show exhibits and been in over four dozen group shows He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey His works, characterised by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms, often have a political content

Melvin Edwards is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation, and one of the most fascinating sculptors working today. Very early in his career, Edwards was attracted to the ruggedness and malleability of steel, departing from a previous interest in painting. His paintings were concerned with volume and form, such that sculpture was a logical next step, and, perhaps, a reflection of his longstanding interest in the aesthetic formalities of Renaissance art. His relief sculptures are striking yet unpretentious, and range from the angular, asymmetrical, elegiac, and geometric, to the formally complex. Although his sculptural approach is mostly expressed in welding, the resulting mangled and contorted forms appear to have been molded. Edwards’s unique language of abstraction— breaking down and recomposing material form in that robust search for a certain vitality and meaning—is at once terse and eloquent, what one critic has described as “formal simplicity and solid materiality.” His subject matter has included universal human issues, including civil rights, human dignity, and social equality, which he grounds in specific histories and contexts such as the black experience in the United States and Africa, among others.

Melvin Eugene Edwards, Jr, was born in Houston, Texas, the eldest of his parents' four children Edwards is a graduate of the University of Southern California and also studied at Los Angeles City College, and the Los Angeles County Art Institute

Edwards’s extensive exhibition history, beginning with his first solo exhibition at the Santa Barbara, California, Museum of Art in 1965, marked him as someone with a distinct sculptural voice and destined for success. From 1972 until his retirement in 2002, he taught at some of the leading art programs in the United States, complementing his studio practice and training several generations of artists. In addition to his studio work, Edwards has created public art both in the United States and internationally in an attempt to engage a broader public audience, beyond that of the art world. His career is punctuated by critical highlights that parallel historical moments in American history as well as global black history.

In 1964, he began teaching at San Bernardino Valley College He went on to teach at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), the Orange County Community College in New York, and the University of Connecticut His first one-person exhibition was held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, in 1965 In 1972 he began teaching at Rutgers University, where he taught classes in sculpture, drawing and Third World artists until his retirement from the school in 2002 In 1975 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship

Edwards began his longstanding and iconic Lynch Fragments series in 1963, a project that was initially inspired by racial violence and civil rights demands in the United States. Divided into three phases of the 1960s, 1970s, and post-1970s, the series includes works motivated by his activism against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, those that honor longstanding cultural traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, and others that pay homage to such notable black persons as the late French Guianese poet and politician Leon Gontran Damas, whom Edwards had befriended.

In 1976, Edwards married the poet Jayne Cortez

Edwards' research into Third World visual culture has taken him to Morocco, Brazil, China, Cuba, and Nigeria Inspiration for Edwards comes from his ancestral home, Africa, where he currently spends several months each year working as a sculptor in Senegal He is a resident of New York City, and is represented by Alexander Gray Associates, a contemporary art gallery located in New York City

Edwards is best known for his "Lynch Fragments" Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, these small-scale welded metal wall reliefs were developed in three periods: 1963 to 1967, 1973 to 1974, and 1978 to the present There are now more than 200 pieces in the series Edwards believes the series is metaphorical of the struggles experienced by African Americans A variety of metal objects including hammer heads, scissors, locks, chains and railroad splices, are employed as the raw materials for these works The sculptures, usually no more than a foot tall, are hung on the wall at eye level One critic noted "their brutish power conjures the instruments used to subjugate African Americans during centuries of slavery and oppression" Edwards is also known for his large public sculpture, smaller freestanding works, the kinetic "Rockers" series, and works executed in the medium of printmaking His large-scale works include "Mt Vernon", "Homage to Billie Holiday and the Young Ones at Soweto" (1977, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD) and "Breaking of the Chains" (1995, San Diego, CA)

At the Biennale di Venezia, Edwards presents Igun Hammer (1981), Freedom Weapon Variant (1986–1992), September Portion (1991), and Texas Tales (1992). These works mirror the long trajectory of his career and, more importantly, his capacious creative energy, aesthetic ethos, and wide-ranging interests.

Edwards has exhibited widely in the US as well as in Africa and Europe Recent solo exhibitions in 2014 included at the Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris, France, and at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, UK Several of his works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art His work is also represented in the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, and the Mott-Warsh Collection in Flint, MI, among other places

In 2012, his work appeared at MOMA PS-1

A 30-year retrospective of his sculpture was held in 1993 at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York

A 50-year retrospective of his work, entitled Melvin Edwards: Five Decades, opened at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, on January 31, 2015, on view until May 10, 2015 The exhibition also toured to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University

Edwards' works were featured in Art Basel Miami Beach 2015

Edwards' awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Zimbabwe, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts In 1992, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994

Edwards received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design on May 23, 2014

He is the subject of a documentary film by Lydie Diakhaté, entitled Some Bright Morning: The Art Of Melvin Edwards, released in 2016
https://hisour.com/artist/mel-edwards/