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

Art in America, March, 1993 by Brooke Kamin Rapaport

The "Lynch Fragment" series has consistently explored African customs and culture, both in American contexts and in Africa itself. The works in this series, because of their size and their position on the wall at the viewer's eye level, have been said to recall African masks. Edwards finds that response simplistic and prefers to call attention to the wider plastic influences on his work of African sculpture as a whole. He has traveled frequently to Africa, the first time in 1970, when he met Nana Osei Bonsu, an Asante and a master woodcarver. In 1971 he became acquainted with Omoregbe Inneh, the chief of the Benin bronze casters. These esteemed elderly men, both of whom were university teachers as well as representatives of African sculptural traditions, were models for Edwards. He also came to know many younger African artists with international interests.

In 1973, in an urban East Coast setting, Edwards returned to the "Lynch Fragment" theme under the shadow of the Vietnam War. In these works the lynching metaphor alludes to the black community's outrage over the large number of blacks who fought in Southeast Asia. Two works of that year are formally spare arrangements of just a few elements attached to a diamond-shape steel plate. Nam may be considered the male half of a sculptural pair in which Yesterday's Key is the female. Welded vertical and horizontal scars form Nam's axes; a protruding automotive part and a dangling chain make the work phallic and testicular. Yesterday's Key has the same horizontal wound, but the spreading of the vertical seam suggests the female genital cleft. By this pairing, Edwards suggests that neither gender escaped the effects of the war.

By 1978, Edwards, ensconced in the studio he still occupies in Plainfield, N.J., had concluded that the lynching theme remained vital. Ngangula, a "Lynch Fragment" of 1980, is titled with the Kikongo word for blacksmith and medicine doctor, a term translated by his Congolese friend, the writer Sony Labou Tansi. Edwards's link to the craft of the blacksmith is evident in his forging technique and his tools. Ngangula breaks free from compositional restraints to create a new form, its three steel spikes raggedly jutting into the air and a large bolt thrusting out to penetrate the viewer's space.

Sekuru Knows, 1988, again addresses the constrictions of manual labor. Here scissors that recall a spread-eagled human form are bound by chains and welded tightly into a work of industrial and fabricated elements, suggesting a thwarted effort to cut ties. Sekuru, Edwards says, refers in the Shona language to a grandfather or a wise elder, and scissors are a symbol of good luck to metalworkers in Benin. Edwards has previously used pinking shears in a work identified with his mother, Thelmarie Edwards, who was a seamstress.

Crossing metal rods at the top of Takawira-J., 1987, add a geometric dynamism to the work - and perhaps allude to horns. This sculpture was made during the artist's stint of teaching direct metal welding processes in Zimbabwe. There he got to know three brothers of the Takawira family, all of them sculptors. The eldest, John, was of the generation of artists who imbued contemporary stone sculpture with African traditions. He died that year, and this sculpture, Edwards's tribute to a fellow artist, adopts Takawira's volumetric emphasis to produce a work which fuses Western practice with African sculptural form.