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Bio Summary

Melvin Edwards - Artists - Alexander Gray Associates

Melvin Edwards, 2019. Photo: Ross Collab

Melvin Edwards (b.1937) is a pioneer in the history of contemporary African American art and sculpture. Born in Houston, Texas, he began his artistic career at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, where he met and was mentored by the Hungarian painter Francis de Erdely. In 1965, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA organized his first solo exhibition, which launched his professional career. Edwards moved to New York City in 1967, shortly after his arrival, his work was exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem; in 1970, he became the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Biography

Melvin Edwards (b.1937) is a pioneer in the history of contemporary African American art and sculpture. Born in Houston, Texas, he began his artistic career at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, where he met and was mentored by the Hungarian painter Francis de Erdely. In 1965, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA organized his first solo exhibition, which launched his professional career. Edwards moved to New York City in 1967. Shortly after his arrival, his work was exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem and in 1970, he became the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Edwards’s practice reflects his engagement with the history of race, labor, and violence, as well as with themes of the African Diaspora. Making welding his preferred medium, his sculptures are studies in abstraction and minimalism. Ranging from colorful painted sculptures that expand on the modernist vocabulary of artists like Alexander Calder to barbed wire installations to tangled amalgamations of agricultural and industrial elements, his work is distinguished by its formal simplicity and powerful materiality.

Edwards remains best known for his series of Lynch Fragments, welded combinations of disparate objects that invite competing narratives of oppression and creation. This body of work spans three periods: the early 1960s, when the artist responded to racial violence in the United States; the early 1970s, when his activism concerning the Vietnam War motivated him to return to the series; and from 1978 to the present, as he continues to explore a variety of themes, including his personal connection to Africa. Edwards first traveled to the continent in the 1970s with his late wife, the poet Jayne Cortez. Since his initial trip, he has returned to Africa many times, teaching welding in different countries before ultimately establishing a studio in Dakar, Senegal in 2000.

In addition, Edwards has a longstanding commitment to public art. Since the 1960s, he has created sculptures for universities, public housing projects, and museums. His commissions include Homage to My Father and the Spirit (1969) at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Holder of the Light (1985) at Lafayette Gardens, Jersey City, NJ; and Asafo Kra No (1993) at the Utsukushi-Ga-Hara Open-Air Museum, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. Edwards’s large-scale sculptures extend his extraordinary range of aesthetic expression, reaffirming his commitment to abstraction.

Retrospectives of Edwards’s work have been presented at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX (2015), traveled to Zimmerli Museum of Art, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (2015), and to Columbus Museum of Art, OH (2016), and Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York at Purchase (1993), traveled to The Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami (1994), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH (1994), and McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (1995). Edwards’s sculptures are currently on view at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA and Dia Beacon, NY. His work has been the subject of recent one-person exhibitions at City Hall Park, Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2021); Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); and Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil (2018), among others. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including New York: 1962–1964, The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2022); The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2021), traveled to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2021); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2017), traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK (2018), Brooklyn Museum, NY (2018), The Broad, Los Angeles, CA (2019), de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA (2019), and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2020); Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945–1965, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2016); 56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures, Italy (2015); Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2014); traveled to Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH (2014); and Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin (2015); and Blues for Smoke, The Geffen Contemporary at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2012), traveled to Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2013), and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2013). Edwards’s work is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Dia Art Foundation, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Edwards taught at Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey, from 1972 to 2002. In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston.

The artist is also represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, United Kingdom.

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Public Collections

The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, FL
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Baltimore Museum of Art, MD
Birmingham Museum of Art, AL
The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY
Brooklyn Museum, NY
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, FL
Center Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA
Chase Manhattan Bank, New York
The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR
Dallas Museum of Art, TX
David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI
Detroit Institute of Arts, MI
Dia Art Foundation, NY
Flint Institute of Arts, MI
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
James E. Lewis Museum of Art, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD
Joseph P. Addabbo Federal Building, Jamaica, NY
Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn, NY
Lafayette College, Easton, PA
Long Beach Museum of Art, CA
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Miami University, FL
Miami University, Oxford, OH
Montclair Art Museum, NJ
Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, MI
Museo de Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero, Caracas, Venezuela
Museum de Domijnen, Netherlands
Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX
National Academy of Design, New York, NY
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York at Purchase
The New Jersey State Museum, Trenton
New York City Parks, NY
The Newark Museum, NJ
Peat, Marwick, and Mitchell, Montvale, NJ
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, NE
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom
University of Maryland, College Park, MD
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA
Winston-Salem State University, NC
Worcester Art Museum, MA