‘Once I started to weld steel,” said the sculptor Melvin Edwards, who died on March 30 at age 88, “I realized much of the world I lived in is welded. I’d be driving behind a truck, and it’s got a tailgate, and I realize: oh all of that, that tailgate, that’s welded—and it’s a beautiful relief sculpture.”
Welding was the means, but Mr. Edwards’s message, which was held in astute balance by the sculptural forms in his long series, “Lynch Fragments,” was racial justice. He halted the series in the mid-1960s, but returned to it the following decade and continued with it into the final years of his life. The “Lynch Fragments” were small, compact and muscular sculptures. The first was “Some Bright Morning,” whose title was taken from a passage in Ralph Ginzburg’s book “100 Years of Lynchings.” Like almost all of his work, it contains spikes, chains, bolts and ordinary metal tools, which together suggest slavery, captivity and punishment. Later, in the 1970s, his sculptures were informed by his opposition to the war in Vietnam.
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