In 1963, a young African-American artist who had moved from the segregated south to Los Angeles took a few scraps of steel and welded them together. What this abstract work resembled fell on the beholder and the angle from which they viewed it – Are those two sharp triangles protruding from a circle the hands of a clock or the blades of a knife? Is that a hammer smashing someone’s head or a lever? – but to most it seemed clear what Some Bright Morning represented: oppression, violence, fear.
Melvin Edwards took the name for this small wall piece, nine inches wide and little more than a foot long if you include the dangling chain with a misshapen blob at the end, from a phrase in a book called 100 Years of Lynchings by Ralph Ginzburg. The author spoke of black farm workers being threatened that they would be attacked “some bright morning”. The lumps of metal at the welded points represented the victims’ wounds and weals, the scars that defaced the American dream.
...
Read full article at observer.co.uk
