Melvin Edwards
Melvin Eugene Edwards Jr. is an American abstract sculptor, printmaker, and arts educator. Edwards, an African-American artist, was raised in segregated communities in Texas and an integrated community in Ohio. He moved to California in 1955, beginning his professional art career while an undergraduate student. Originally trained as a painter, Edwards began exploring sculpture and welding techniques in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, before moving again to New York in 1967.
Edwards is best known for his Lynch Fragments sculptures, a series of small, abstract steel assemblage sculptures made with spikes, scissors, chains, and other small metal objects welded together into wall reliefs, which he first began making in 1963. In addition to their titular reference to lynching, these works have been described by the artist as metaphors for the struggles and successes of African Americans living in the United States.
He is also known for his minimalist sculptural environments built with strands of barbed wire and chain beginning in the late 1960s; his kinetic Rockers sculptures, painted metal works built on discs that can rock back and forth; and his monumental outdoor sculptures, often characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular, circular, and rectangular metal forms along with oversized chain motifs. Edwards has also worked extensively in printmaking, beginning in college and continuing throughout his career. Edwards's works, despite containing many elements of abstract art, often deviate from a pure expression of abstraction through explicit references to African-American and African history as well as contemporary politics and events in their titles and underlying materials.
Edwards has mounted more than a dozen solo exhibitions in museums and galleries across the United States and internationally. In 1970, he was the first African-American sculptor to receive a solo show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Following a period of decline in attention from curators and critics in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s, Edwards's art was included in several high-profile national and international exhibitions in the 2000s and 2010s, leading to an increase in critical attention toward his work both within the art world and more broadly. Edwards has also taught art in several universities across the country, including a 30-year teaching career at Rutgers University, from which he retired in 2002. He lives and works between upstate New York, New Jersey, and Senegal.
A traveling retrospective of Edwards's work is currently on view at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris through February 15, 2026.
Early life and education
Melvin Eugene Edwards Jr. was born on May 4, 1937, in Houston, Texas, the eldest of four children born to Thelmarie Edwards and Melvin Edwards Sr. The family moved in 1942 to McNair, Texas, where Edwards started first grade, before moving again to Dayton, Ohio, in 1944 for Melvin Sr.'s job at the Boy Scouts of America. Edwards attended the racially integrated schools Wogoman Elementary and Irving Elementary in Dayton. He has said that he first began to understand the concept of art after his fourth-grade art teacher at Irving had the class practice figure drawing; while the other students drew cartoon images of their classmate who was posing, Edwards noticed that his own drawing was a more realistic portrayal: "this was a revelation to me. It was a surprise... that that could be done." He often took trips with his family and school to the Dayton Art Institute.In 1949, his family moved in with Edwards's grandmother in Houston, having returned to Texas for his father's new job with Houston Lighting & Power. His parents later divorced during his childhood. Edwards grew up in Houston during a time of racial segregation, attending E. O. Smith Junior High School and Phillis Wheatley High School. He began seriously making art at a young age, encouraged by his parents; his father was himself an amateur painter who built Edwards's first easel with a family friend. While attending high school, a teacher introduced Edwards to abstract art and he was one of two students selected from his school to take art classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He was also an avid athlete, playing football throughout high school.
After graduating from high school, he moved to Los Angeles in 1955, living with his aunt and uncle while working part-time to pay for courses at Los Angeles City College. While in college, he held a number of jobs, including at the post office, in a warehouse, and as a hospital porter. He was interested in studying art but at the same time wanted to continue his sports career, so he transferred to the University of Southern California, where he was able both to play football and study. His first period of study at USC was primarily focused on painting, and his professors included Francis de Erdely and Hans Burkhardt. Edwards then accepted a scholarship to attend the Los Angeles County Art Institute, his first sculpture teachers there being Renzo Fenci and Joe Mugnaini, but he transferred back to USC after six months when he received a scholarship to return to play football. Edwards nearly failed one of his undergraduate history courses at USC; he attributed his grade to a disagreement over the professor's Eurocentric views. This inspired his later visits to Africa to learn about the history of the continent.
While attending USC, Edwards met fellow art student Karen Hamre; the two married in 1960 and Hamre gave birth to their first daughter the same year. Edwards became friends with several other artists in Los Angeles, including Marvin Harden, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Ron Miyashiro, Ed Bereal, and David Novros. It was around this period that Edwards met Charles White, one of the best-known African-American artists of the era, who had moved to Los Angeles in 1956; the actor Ivan Dixon would soon purchase one of Edwards's works as a gift for White. Edwards also began spending time at Dwan Gallery, owned by Virginia Dwan, meeting well-known artists associated with minimalism and land art.
Edwards finished the majority of his undergraduate coursework by 1960, although he did not receive his degree until 1965, due to an uncompleted language course necessary for graduation.
Life and career
1960s
1960–1964: Early career, first ''Lynch Fragments''
After finishing the majority of his studies at USC, Edwards asked graduate student and sculptor George Baker to teach him to weld. Edwards took additional night classes with Baker in 1962 to learn more about the technique and process. To help support his family, Edwards found employment in a ceramics factory owned by fellow USC graduate Tony Hill, where he was trained in specialized finishing techniques to complete the modernist ceramics produced in the factory. In addition, he later found work at a film production company owned by Novros's father. The company's office was located near June Wayne's Tamarind Lithography Workshop, and Edwards would visit the center during his lunch breaks, meeting influential national artists such as George Sugarman, Richard Hunt, Leon Golub, and Louise Nevelson, as well as Museum of Modern Art print curator Riva Castleman. Living in Los Angeles, Edwards was also introduced to the work of a number of Mexican muralist artists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco, which he said inspired him to similarly draw on his cultural background in his art to communicate his social and political views.Edwards spent several years in the early 1960s experimenting with different welding techniques, eventually buying his own equipment and setting up a studio in a garage that Hill owned. In 1963, this experimentation resulted in a small abstract relief sculpture titled Some Bright Morning, comprising a shallow cylindrical form accented by bits of steel, a blade-shaped triangle of steel, and a short chain hanging from the piece with a small lump of metal at its end. Edwards explained that the title of the piece was a reference to a story from Ralph Ginzburg's anthology 100 Years of Lynchings, a compilation of reports on lynchings in the United States published the year prior. The story, as retold by Edwards, relays the narrative of a black family in Florida successfully fighting back against their white neighbors who had threatened to come to the property on "some bright morning" in order to kill them. This sculpture became the first in his Lynch Fragments series. Partly inspired by developments in the Civil Rights Movement and unrest in Los Angeles over the police killing of a black man in 1962, these welded metal wall reliefs are usually small in size. Edwards has described the series as a metaphor for the struggles experienced by African Americans. He has employed a variety of metal objects to create these abstract works, including hammer heads, scissors, locks, chains, and railroad spikes.
Edwards traveled to New York for the first time in 1963, visiting MoMA after having heard that it was possible to meet well-known artists who were working as guards there. The first person he met at the museum was the artist William Majors, a member of the African-American art group Spiral. On his trip to the city, Edwards also met artist Hale Woodruff, another member of Spiral, and showed Woodruff several of his Lynch Fragments sculptures.
In the mid-1960s, Edwards began assisting Dwan Gallery with freelance repairs for sculptures and installations by several of the gallery's artists, including Jean Tinguely's mechanical sculptures. Edwards also helped artist Mark di Suvero to install a number of works alongside a highway in Los Angeles.
1965–1969: Rising recognition, move to New York, Smokehouse
The first one-person exhibition of sculpture by Edwards was held in 1965 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He exhibited several of his Lynch Fragments sculptures there, along with the first iteration of a work titled Chaino, which consisted of a small abstract metal assemblage suspended in midair with chains attached to the walls and a metal rod hanging from the ceiling; he later built a metal armature for Chaino so that it could be displayed suspended without the need of a wall or ceiling rod. Writing in Artforum, critic David Gebhard positively reviewed the exhibition, saying: "Perfection of workmanship and a full understanding of material has been united with the formal content of each work." In 1965, Edwards also began teaching at the Chouinard Art Institute. His second and third children, twin daughters, were born that same year.Around this time, he also began to create a new series of works comprising dense central abstract assemblage forms suspended within various types of metal enclosures, similar to Chaino. He created several such works in 1965, including The Lifted X, named in honor of Malcolm X after his murder in February that year; this piece consists of a large metal form with a meat hook hanging from its underside, lifted above a metal armature with an "X" formed by the bars on its base. Toward the end of 1965, he showed several of these works in a group exhibition of five younger artists from L.A. at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1966, Edwards created Cotton Hangup, a similar assemblage form, hung at first from the ceiling; however, he eventually reworked the piece so as to let it be suspended in mid-air from three chains anchored to the gallery ceiling and walls. While he believed that some viewers would interpret these suspended chain works as thematically oriented around lynching, Edwards said that the works represented for him "an opportunity to investigate the principles of suspension".
His work was included in the historical survey exhibition The Negro in American Art, organized by art historian James Porter at UCLA in 1966. Sam Gilliam was also included in the exhibition, and after Edwards saw Gilliam's work, the two became friends and colleagues. Edwards visited New York again in 1966 to search for housing and studio space in the city for his family to relocate. On this trip, he helped his friend Robert Grosvenor install a sculpture in the exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, which introduced Edwards to a broader group of artists working in minimalism. Also in 1966, Edwards participated in the construction of the Peace Tower in Los Angeles, an abstract public sculpture and exhibition space designed to protest the Vietnam War; Edwards and di Suvero constructed the metal armature serving as the base. Art historian Kellie Jones described Edwards as "one of the city's most visible African-American artists" by 1967.
Edwards moved to New York in January 1967, relocating with his wife and children. Johnson and Miyashiro, who had both themselves moved to the city from California, helped the family settle. He had been encouraged by other artists, Sugarman in particular, to move to New York in order to further his career and find more opportunities. He also made the decision to stop creating new sculptures for the Lynch Fragments series, choosing instead to focus on other, larger works. Edwards and Hamre decided to separate shortly after they moved to New York, and she returned to California with their daughters; they divorced soon afterwards. After moving to New York, Edwards secured a position teaching art at Orange County Community College in the Hudson Valley north of the city.
He was soon introduced to the artist William T. Williams at a party for Sugarman after the artist Al Held recommended they connect; they quickly became close friends and colleagues. Around this period, Edwards also met the painter and writer Frank Bowling, another black abstract artist, who became a champion of Edwards's work in his criticism. In the summer of 1968, Edwards attended a residency at the Sabathani Community Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he began to create large abstract geometric painted-metal sculptures; the Walker Art Center exhibited the works soon afterwards, one of the museum's first exhibitions of public sculpture. These painted sculptures used bright, primary colors, a theme he was inspired to explore by Sugarman's work. Edwards then traveled to Los Angeles, to install a large solo exhibition at the Barnsdall Art Center, before returning to New York to join Williams and his new initiative Smokehouse.
Smokehouse was a New York-based community wall-painting initiative developed by Williams, named for the outdoor structure often used in the rural southern United States to cure meat. The project was born from a desire shared by Williams and others to develop public art projects that could have a positive social effect on their communities. Smokehouse created a series of wall paintings consisting of hard-edge graphics and geometric patterns, designed and executed with local community members, all located along several streets in Harlem. The group's ethos was in direct contrast to a similar initiative in New York, City Walls, which had begun several years prior and which consisted of mostly white artists displaying their own artwork on buildings without consulting the residents, an approach the Smokehouse artists believed to be self-centered. Although Smokehouse was primarily community-based, the group did give several presentations about their initiative to art world audiences; Edwards described these presentations as semi-performance art, wherein the artists would throw black-eyed peas at the audiences during the lecture as a provocation and a demonstration of "an example of African culture transposed to here". Edwards later connected his time with Smokehouse to his interest in Mexican muralists such as Orozco and Siqueiros. He participated primarily during the summers of 1968 and 1969.
Edwards moved into a farmhouse in Orange County in the fall of 1968, living alone. During this period, he began developing a new series of barbed-wire sculptural installations. These works comprised strands of barbed wire and chain strung in different shapes and patterns from walls and ceilings in gallery spaces, extending into the room to form environments rather than discrete individual sculptures. In early 1969, Edwards's friend from Los Angeles, Bob Rogers, suggested that he create illustrations for a poetry collection by Jayne Cortez. Edwards and Cortez had met briefly in California, but were reacquainted and became closer in New York after Edwards provided several drawings for her first book, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man's Wares.
Edwards, Williams, and Gilliam exhibited their work together with Williams's former classmate Stephan Kelsey in June 1969 at the Studio Museum in Harlem for the exhibition X to the Fourth Power. Edwards showed the first of his barbed-wire installations, including Pyramid Up and Down Pyramid, a pyramidal form made with lengths of barbed wire stretched across a corner of the gallery. Edwards, Williams, and Gilliam, all African-American artists making abstract art, would go on to stage several additional exhibitions as a trio in the 1970s. At the time of the exhibition, some black artists, curators, and activists had begun to view art as a secondary concern to the needs of political developments such as the rise of the black power movement, preferring art of the era that served an explicit functional purpose within a social movement rather than art made as aesthetic exploration or for non-political use, including abstract art, a debate that was ongoing within the Studio Museum itself. The works that Edwards exhibited, along with those of his fellow artists, were explicitly non-representational and did not serve a political function; several reviews of the exhibition focused on this perceived tension.
In the fall of 1969, Bowling curated the exhibition 5+1 at SUNY Stony Brook featuring work by six black artists making abstract art: Edwards, Williams, Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and Bowling himself. Edwards exhibited the second of his barbed-wire installations, Curtain for William and Peter, a wall of strands of barbed wire hung from the ceiling that ran the entire length of the gallery and divided the space in two, named for Williams and the artist Peter Bradley.
Edwards also completed his first major public commission in 1969, the outdoor sculpture Homage to My Father and the Spirit, created for Cornell University's Johnson Museum. The sculpture comprises a large vertical stainless-steel disc connected to a triangular panel of steel with a stepped outer edge painted orange, green, blue, and yellow. That same year, he met the French poet Léon-Gontran Damas, a founder of the Négritude intellectual movement, at a party that Cortez hosted for Damas in her apartment. Damas became a friend and mentor to the younger artist, often visiting New York, where Edwards would drive him around for his meetings and appointments; Edwards and Cortez also traveled to Washington, D.C., to see Damas and his wife.