Sculptor Melvin Edwards, known for powerful works exploring the history of racial violence and the experiences of Black people in America, as well as themes of beauty and joy, died at his home in Baltimore on March 30. He was eighty-eight. His death was confirmed by New York gallery Alexander Gray and Associates, which represents him. Frequently working with found metal at the confined space of a dining or kitchen table, he produced sculptures whose compact size belied their taut physicality and forceful presence, before turning to larger stainless steel works as his career progressed. His “Lynch Fragments,” small welded assemblages of chains, tools, railroad spikes, and other metal objects, which he began making in 1963, evolved over the decades as he variously drew inspiration from personal experience, the Vietnam War, African artifacts, and the lives of his friends and of African diasporic figures. “I have no illusions that what I do will change things much,” he told Bomb magazine’s Michael Brenson in 2014. “I just wanted to be sure I didn’t get caught not expressing what I thought was important to me.”
Melvin Edwards was born on May 4, 1937, in Houston, the oldest of four children. Houston at the time was so segregated, Edwards later told Brenson, “I didn’t know there was a white community.” On getting a job with the Boy Scouts of America, his father moved the family to Dayton, Ohio, where young Melvin studied at an integrated school, took life drawing classes, and visited museums. While Edwards was still a boy, the family was forced to move back to Houston, where he painted, using an easel his father bought him, and began playing football to burn off energy. The sport’s dynamics and rigorous plotting of plays would profoundly influence his work, as he sought new ways of presenting abstract physical poses.
Edwards won a football scholarship to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he studied painting and learned to weld, creating his first “Lynch Fragment,” Some Bright Morning (Lynch Fragment), in 1963, a circular mass of steel from which protruded a lethal-looking blade, along whose razorlike edge hung a length of chain. In 1965, the year he graduated, he received his first solo exhibition, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Two years later, with his first wife, Karen Hamre and their three children, he moved to New York and took a job teaching at Orange County Community College. He continued to produce his dense, diminutive metal abstractions.
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