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

Art in America, March, 1993 by Brooke Kamin Rapaport

While Some Bright Morning extracts the factual and spiritual militancy from an incident of violence in 19th-century America and by extension refers to the civil rights movement that was at its height when the piece was made, Afro Phoenix No. 2, also from 1963, is a symbol of promise. In this work, by means of a steel shaft with two upraised arms that have the sweep of wings, Edwards alludes to the situation of blacks, whom he sees as "coming out of difficulty and producing something new."[5]

When Edwards, who was born in 1937, received his B.A. from the University of Southern California, the dominance of Abstract Expressionism was fading. One might see links between his work and Abstract-Expressionist sculpture, and Edwards certainly knew the work of Theodore Roszak, David Smith and others of the time. But as a painting major, he says, he was not influenced by it. In the early '60s, a fellow student taught him how to weld, and thereafter his principal work was sculpture.

Among the works he has produced concurrent with the "Lynch Fragment" series is a body of public sculpture, often commissioned and usually having a geometric character. He made his first public piece in 1969. A representative work of 1991, Tomorrow's Wind, installed in Central Park across from the Plaza Hotel prior to permanent siting in Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem, consists of a tilted-back disk, a bladelike element and what might be a fragment of a house; these symbolic forms are all made of stainless steel and reach 13% feet in height.

Another major group of works is the "Rocker" series, kinetic sculptures of both small and large size that, like the "Lynch Fragment" sculptures, derive from the personal: they are inspired by the movement of his grandmother's rocking chair. The first of these, CoCo, 1970, was given her nickname. It is an almost sleigh-shaped sculpture consisting of a pair of upturned semicircles of steel joined by two bars from which hang multiple chains in catenaries that echo the curve of the steel.

Edwards has said that he "became an adult in a very confrontational period in relation to African people in the world"; perhaps as a result, public recognition of his work has come unevenly. Mary Schmidt Campbell, who curated Edwards's 1978 show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, once described New York as having been "increasingly hostile as the years went by to the vision evolving among those Black artists who chose to respond" to the turbulence of the '60s.[6] Edwards recalls that following his 1970 solo show in the Whitney Museum's lobby gallery, he thought that "something else significant should have happened. But when it didn't, I just kept on working."[7] A similar lack of attention following his Studio Museum show shocked Campbell. "It was like nothing, like the show didn't happen. It was scary. It was chilling," she has said.[8] Both his often-difficult subject matter and his race may explain this lack of attention.

However, Edwards and other artists have benefited from the art world's recent embrace of multiculturalism and pluralism. His recognition is growing. In 1990 he had his first gallery show in New York, at CDS. During or following that show, works from the "Lynch Fragment" series were purchased by the Bronx Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as by museums in Birmingham, Ala., and Caracas. This spring, Edwards's work will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y.