Melvin Edwards

Melvin "Mel" Edwards (born May 4, 1937) is an American abstract sculptor, printmaker, and arts educator. Edwards, an African-American artist, was raised in segregated communities in Texas and an integrated community in Ohio. He moved to California in 1955, beginning his professional art career while an undergraduate student. Originally trained as a painter, Edwards began exploring sculpture and welding techniques in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, before moving again to New York in 1967.

Edwards is best known for his Lynch Fragments sculptures, a series of small, abstract steel assemblage sculptures made with spikes, scissors, chains, and other small metal objects welded together into wall reliefs, which he first began making in 1963. In addition to their titular reference to lynching, these works have been described by the artist as metaphors for the struggles and successes of African Americans living in the United States.

He is also known for his minimalist sculptural environments built with strands of barbed wire and chain beginning in the late 1960s; his kinetic Rockers sculptures, painted metal works built on discs that can rock back and forth; and his monumental outdoor sculptures, often characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular, circular, and rectangular metal forms along with oversized chain motifs. Edwards has also worked extensively in printmaking, beginning in college and continuing throughout his career. Edwards's works, despite containing many elements of abstract art, often deviate from a pure expression of abstraction through explicit references to African-American and African history as well as contemporary politics and events in their titles and underlying materials.

Edwards has mounted more than a dozen solo exhibitions in museums and galleries across the United States and internationally. In 1970, he was the first African-American sculptor to receive a solo show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Following a period of decline in attention from curators and critics in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s, Edwards's art was included in several high-profile national and international exhibitions in the 2000s and 2010s, leading to an increase in critical attention toward his work both within the art world and more broadly. Edwards has also taught art in several universities across the country, including a 30-year teaching career at Rutgers University, from which he retired in 2002. He lives and works between upstate New York, New Jersey, and Senegal.