Melvin Edwards, a celebrated sculptor who was known for an explosive group of improvisational, wall-mounted steel pieces called Lynch Fragments that welded pure abstraction to the realest of real-world references, died on Monday at his home in Baltimore. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by Alejandro Jassan, a spokesman for Alexander Gray Associates, the gallery that represents him.
Mr. Edwards made the very first of his breakthrough series of artworks in 1963. In it, an asymmetrical group of forms, both recognizable and abstract, emerges from a pipe-like opening: blobs of flux, bars that resemble tools, blade-like triangles. On the left, in front of the longest, most menacing triangle, hangs a battered length of chain trailing a misshapen lump of steel.
The piece is striking in the feeling of power and energy it evokes simply by holding together so many disparate shapes, depths, directions and associations.
Chains evoke violence, but also labor, connection and, sometimes, salvation. “If your car is broken down in the Jersey woods,” Mr. Edwards pointed out in 2000, “you’re happy to see them coming with the chains.”
Similarly, although the piece is clearly in conversation with other American modernist sculpture, it also reflects Mr. Edwards’s interest in West African sculpture and metalwork.
The work’s ostensibly hopeful title, “Some Bright Morning,” was drawn from a violent threat to a Black family in Florida that was recorded in Ralph Ginzburg’s 1962 book, “100 Years of Lynchings.” But Mr. Edwards made it clear that he had many incidents of anti-Black violence in mind, including the shooting death of Ronald Stokes by members of the Los Angeles Police Department that had recently taken place at a Nation of Islam mosque.
The title of the series “came about a little later,” he said in a 2014 interview with Michael Brenson for Bomb magazine. “But I realized I was developing a body of work.”
It was important, however, that the artwork not be “stuck in formalist criticism,” he added. “I wanted to make you think about why I made the work. For me, the whole thing about modern art is you can invent your own game and all the rules. It’s just a matter of, does it come out vital as work?”
Still, not wanting to be stuck in formalism didn’t mean giving up on it altogether. At a time when many Black artists felt caught between communities that insisted on explicitly political work and an art world that had little room for Black artists whatever they did, giving his series a name as specific, and arresting, as Lynch Fragments created room for Mr. Edwards to be as concrete, or as abstract, as he liked.
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