Melvin Edwards: lynch fragments - metal sculpture reflects African-American history

Art in America, March, 1993 by Brooke Kamin Rapaport

In a series of some 150 metal wall sculptures developed over 30 years, Melvin Edwards has used the metaphor of lynching to evoke a legacy of collective oppression and to encompass a broad range of African-American history.

Melvin Edwards's "Lynch Fragment" series is an extended sculptural treatment of a theme derived from private memory and collective African-American experience. Each of the more than 150 welded-steel reliefs he has made since 1963 in this series of mostly head-size, wall-hung works incorporates metallic found objects - links of chain, railroad spikes, hoes, hooks, locks, hammers, scissors - which evoke the manual labor associated with slavery and oppression.

Edwards's use of tools and his thematic metaphor have proven remarkably flexible for encompassing a broad range of African- American history. He draws on the family stories he heard in his boyhood in Houston and Dayton; the sense of conflict he felt in California around the time of the historic civil rights March on Washington, when he began the series; and the racial and social tensions he encountered after his move to New York in 1967. Only a few of the works in the series directly address incidents of lynching, but he intends the titular continuity to bring "that scale of intensity and that kind of power" to all the works.[1]

The sculptures in the "Lynch Fragment" series have been made in three periods: 1963 to '67, 1973, and 1978 to the present. Although early and recent works are not sharply differentiated stylistically, some general distinctions apply. In the works made prior to 1978, the core of each sculpture is densely constructed, with appendages radiating from the center. Often that core establishes a compositional symmetry that is altered by the placement of the additions. In the works since 1978, the appendages extend not only from the center but from the edges, creating more complex three-dimensional configurations. In the last five years, the sculptures have grown larger, a fact which Edwards attributes to his having worked outdoors when he was in Zimbabwe on a Fulbright fellowship in 1988 and '89.

Lynching has been an important theme for other African-American artists as well. For example, in Jacob Lawrence's Another Cause Was Lynching .... from "The Migration of the Negro" series, 1940-41, the power of the painting lies not in the gruesome nature of the crime but in its chilling consequences; the painting depicts only the branch, the rope and a huddled, sorrowing figure in the background. Norman Lewis also rendered the essence of the experience in his abstract paintings of the 1960s inspired by the militancy and activism of that time, specifically America the Beautiful from the "Klan" series, in which the repeated hooded figures are a pattern as much as a representation. As a product of the current consciousness that inspires younger artists to create what some describe as "political" art, an untitled 1989 work by Lorna Simpson implies a lynching through circular photographs of a black woman's throat and a list of terms for circular forms ranging from halo to noose.

The emotional resonance of an image of lynching remains great, although the act is virtually unknown in America today - Alabama's Tuskegee Institute stopped collecting data on lynchings in 1968 - because it evokes a colllective memory of oppression. The persistent potency of the image echoes the aftereffects of lynchings themselves, which could intimidate an entire community. "It's the thing people do with power all the time," Edwards says. "You kill someone as an example. The person that you kill is out of his misery as soon as you kill him, but the people around who are living are the ones who suffer from that event."[12] His choice of the lynching theme, Edwards says, has allowed him to "wrestle or grapple with a particular social phenomenon and what it means metaphorically or symbolically."

Ralph Ginzburg's book 100 Years of Lynchings, published in 1962, reprints accounts of lynchings in America, including an 1896 editorial, "White Superiority in Florida," from the Springfield, Mass., Weekly Republican. After reading this document, Edwards, his reaction probably exacerbated by the racial climate in Los Angeles, where he was living in the early '60s, was prompted to produce the first of the "Lynch Fragment" reliefs. He has written of that work:

Some Bright Morning is a piece dedicated to a black family in Florida who had been warned by white people not to be militant. The family continued to be militant until the white people said that some bright morning they were coming to get them, and when they came, the black people were armed and ready. They fought and then took to the swamp in guerrilla warfare against those whites and they didn't lose.[3]

Edwards's relief commemorates this successful resistance.

Both sides of the conflict are welded into Some Bright Morning: a spearlike form juts out from the sculpture, poised to ward off an intruder, while a pendant chain with a steel mass at its end recalls a medieval mace, not to mention a ball and chain. This clump of steel can also be read as a gonadal form, which signals another fight, the one for the procreative continuity of a people - the fight against genocide. Moreover, "The dangling ball of steel at the bottom of the chain is the plastic metaphor of hanging. [And] the piece had to hang on the wall, which furthered the metaphor. I said to myself, |It is hanging there like a lynching,' "Edwards once told an interviewer.[4]