Melvin Edwards, a sculptor whose assemblages of welded steel and barbed wire nodded toward centuries of violence and reframed the visual language of Minimalism, died on Monday in Baltimore. He was 88, according to his gallery, Alexander Gray Associates, which said in its obituary that he died peacefully, in the presence of his wife, Diala Toure.
Edwards remains best known for his “Lynch Fragments,” a body of work he began producing in the 1960s. Working primarily with found steel objects, Edwards created masses of hooks, chains, and beams, some of which were abstracted beyond recognition. His titles—both of the series overall and of the individual works within the series—tended to be forceful, referring to anti-Black violence, Malcolm X, African cultures, and even American-led wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
Many of the “Lynch Fragments” are unsettling. They variously show dismembered limbs, crumpled bodies, and hanging corpses. The weight of their materials conjures a sense of danger, and Edwards’s repeated use of chains calls to mind histories of enslavement and incarceration.
But Edwards was also specific about the fact that the “Lynch Fragments” are not always dark. He once said that his chains were also “symbolically chains of kinship, linkage. The problem is not the chain; it’s how people use it.” And he also said that he intended for the works to contain a certain “human physical intensity,” deliberately hanging his sculptures on museum walls at eye level, “so that it’s about the same place you run into a human head.”
These works and others by Edwards influenced both his colleagues and multiple generations of artists who came after them. Sculptor David Hammons credited Edwards with teaching him about the possibilities of abstraction. Speaking of a work shown in Edwards’s 1970 Whitney Museum show, Hammons said, “That was the first abstract piece of art that I saw that had culture value in it for black people.” That show made Edwards the first Black sculptor ever to have a show at the Whitney.
In a key essay for ARTnews, painter Frank Bowling lauded that same exhibition for “its wit, in the tradition of Duchamp,” adding, “The elegance and deliberately loose-hanging serial geometry were a sure cover for painful implications. The fact that so many critics missed the point is a lesson in the separation of white from black.”
While Edwards has always been a guiding light for Black artists, with the Studio Museum in Harlem staging his first retrospective in 1978, international fame eluded him for decades. (Mary Schmidt Campbell, the Studio Museum’s director at the time, recalled the show receiving “almost no attention” whatsoever in the press.) He did not have a commercial gallery exhibition until 1990, more than 30 years after the start of his career.
In the past two decades, however, Edwards has ascended to his rightful place in the canon. Following an appearance in art historian Kellie Jones’s 2011 exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, he received a survey in 2015 at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, with Catherine Craft serving as its curator. The Museu de Arte de São Paulo surveyed his work in 2018, the Dia Art Foundation staged a presentation of Edwards’s work of the 1970s in 2022, and Naomi Beckwith, a curator at work on the forthcoming edition of Documenta, organized another Edwards survey in 2024 that visited the Fridericianum museum in Kassel, Germany, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
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