Mel Edwards

Melvin "Mel" Edwards (born May 4, 1937) is an American artist, teacher, and abstract steel-metal sculptor. Additionally he has worked in drawing and printmaking. His artwork has political content often referencing African-American history, as well as the exploration of themes within slavery. Visually his works are characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms in metal. He lives between Upstate New York and in Plainfield, New Jersey.

He has had more than a dozen one-person show exhibits and been in over four dozen group shows. Edwards has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey.

Early life and education
Melvin Eugene Edwards, Jr., was born on May 4, 1937, in Houston, Texas, to Thelmarie Edwards and Melvin Edwards Sr, and was the eldest of his parents' four children. His father worked for Houston Lighting & Power and his parents divorced in early childhood. He was raised in Dayton, Ohio, for five years, but by middle-school age the family moved back to Houston, where Edwards grew up during a time of racial segregation. He attended E. O. Smith Junior High School and Phillis Wheatley High School. He was a creator from a young age and was encouraged by his parents with his father building his first easel when he was 14 years old. Edwards was introduced to abstract art by a high-school teacher. While attending high school, Edwards started to take art classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

In 1955, he moved to southern California to pursue studies at Los Angeles City College. Edwards transferred schools to study art and play football at the University of Southern California (USC), where he received his B.F.A. degree in 1965. While attending USC, Edwards took a history course that was rooted in a European-centric view, which upset him and fueled him to learn more about African history. This inspired his travel to Africa five years later.

He attended Los Angeles County Art Institute (known as Otis College of Art and Design) during breaks from USC to study sculpture with Renzo Fenci. Additionally, Edwards was mentored by Hungarian-American painter Francis de Erdely, and studied under Hal Gebhardt, Hans Burkhardt, and Edward Ewing.

Teaching
In 1965, he went on to teach at the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as the California Institute of the Arts) until 1967. He moved to New York City in 1967. Additionally he taught at Orange County Community College in New York (1967–1969), and the University of Connecticut (1970–1972).

In 1972, he began teaching art classes at Livingston College of Rutgers University (now part of the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences). By 1980, he was a full professor and teaching at the Mason Gross School of Creative and Performing Arts at Rutgers University. By 2002, he retired from teaching.

Art career
His first one-person exhibition was held in 1965 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, California. Edwards cited jazz music as an influence on his work.

In 1965, Edwards was working in Los Angeles as a driver for a film company, on his breaks he would visit Tamarind Print Institute. It was at Tamarind where he met many influential national artists such as George Sugarman, Richard Hunt, Leon Golub, Louise Nevelson, and Gabriel Kohn. Later in that year, Sugarman had a New York University art exhibition, which Edwards photographed for him. At that exhibition, Edwards met Al Held and asked him for a job and Held pointed him to a recent Yale University graduate, painter William T. Williams. The two artists went on to have a very close partnership that continues to this day.

In 1969, Edwards met the artist Frank Bowling, a painter who shares his interest in making art that is primarily abstract, a position that would become contested as members of the Black cultural and artistic community called for art to serve as a site of political empowerment. Bowling made a work that referenced Edwards, titled Mel Edwards Decides (1968).

In 1970, Edwards took his first trip to Africa, visiting the West African republics of Nigeria, Togo, Benin, and Ghana. This trip influenced his work, and was followed by other visits to Africa over the years. During the 1970s, he participated in a community art space called Communications Village, operated by printmaker Benjamin Leroy Wigfall in Kingston, NY. Andrews made prints with the help of printer assistants who had been taught printmaking by Wigfall, and Edwards exhibited there.

Smokehouse (1968–1970)
Smokehouse (also known as Smokehouse Associates, Smokehouse Collective, Smokehouse Painters) was a New York City-based community "wall painting" initiative created in part by Melvin Edwards and William T. Williams, spanning from 1968 until 1970. The project existed as a social experiment asking the question: "Can abstraction solve social justice?" The wall paintings consisted of hard-edge graphics and geometric patterns, occurring between 120th Street and 125th Street of Harlem. The project was born out of pondering on how the 19th-century tradition of stacking houses affected the human psyche and Edwards believes there to be a strong correlation between living spaces and the lives of people. He mentions this in an interview at the Soul of a Nation Symposium in 2018, stating: "If you change places, you can change the lives of people." Edwards wanted the public to participate in the way cities were developing. In every project, Smokehouse would hire someone elderly within the community and someone young.

These murals never surpassed 16 feet in scale, due to the height restrictions of the initiative's ladder. Nevertheless, Smokehouse painted alleyways, tops of buildings, and sides of buildings. William T. Williams handled the logistics of the organization. As the project continued, MOMA patron Celeste Bartos and David Rockefeller underwrote these projects. The more recognition they received, the bigger people wanted them to go; however, they did not feel comfortable going too large.

121st and Sylvan still have the annual tradition of doing a community-based mural project because of Smokehouse.

Lynch Fragments series (1963–present)
Edwards' work Some Bright Morning (1963) started his series Lynch Fragments, and was a reference to Ralph Ginzburg's 1962 anthology 100 Years of Lynchings. The series now has more than 200 pieces. Inspired by the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement, these small-scale welded-metal wall reliefs were developed in three periods: 1963 to 1967, 1973 to 1974, and 1978 to the present. Edwards created the series as metaphor of the struggles experienced by African Americans. A variety of metal objects are employed as the raw materials for these works, including hammer heads, scissors, locks, chains, and railroad splices. The sculptures, usually no more than a foot tall, are hung on the wall at eye level.

Rocker series
Edwards is also known for smaller freestanding works, the kinetic "Rockers" series. Works from the Rocker series include, Homage to Coco (1970), Good Friends in Chicago (1972), Avenue B (Rocker) (1975), Memories of Coco (1980), A Conversation with Norman Lewis (1980), among others. These moving sculptures are inspired by his memories, including one of him falling off his grandmother's rocking-chair and another as a homage to his friendships. Edwards used the term "syncopate" to describe the interaction while rocking, and the relationship of syncopation in African-American music.

Other work
Edwards is also known for works executed in the medium of printmaking.

His large-scale, public art works include, Homage to My Father and the Spirit (1969, Cornell University, Appel Commons, Ithaca, New York), Pyramid Up and Down Pyramid (1969, re-fabricated 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City), Homage to Billie Holiday and the Young Ones at Soweto (1977, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland), Out of the Struggles of the Past to a Brilliant Future (1982, Mt Vernon Plaza, Columbus, Ohio), and Breaking of the Chains (1995, San Diego, California).

Exhibitions
Edwards has participated in a large number of solo shows in the United States and internationally. His solo shows include Melvin Edwards (1965), Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; Melvin Edwards: Sculptor (1978), Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Sculpture of Melvin Edwards, SculptureCenter, New York; Mel Edwards: Lynch Fragment Series (1985), Robeson Gallery, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; and Melvin Edwards (2022), Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York.

A 30-year retrospective of his sculpture was held in 1993 at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, and a 50-year retrospective titled Melvin Edwards: Five Decades was held in 2015 at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. Melvin Edwards: Crossroads, an exhibition of 23 sculptures and installations, exploring the cross-cultural connections in the artist's work, was presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art from September 29, 2019 to January 12, 2020.

He has also participated in many group exhibitions, including the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Havana Biennial (2019), and Afro-Atlantic Histories (2018, 2021–2022).

Personal life
Edwards was married in 1960 to Karen Hamre; together they had three children. In 1969, the couple separated; Hamre and the children stayed in Los Angeles while Edwards had already moved to New York City.

In 1976, Edwards married the poet Jayne Cortez. Cortez and Edwards worked together: he illustrated her first book Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man's Wares (1969), and she wrote a series of poems to accompany her husband's work Lynch Fragments.

His art studios are located in upstate New York and in Plainfield, New Jersey, and he often travels to Dakar, Senegal.

Awards and honors

 * 1975 – awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
 * 1984 – grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
 * 1988 – Fulbright Fellowship to Zimbabwe from 1988–1989.
 * 1992 – elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate, and became a full Academician in 1994.
 * 2000 – Lab Grant Artist Residency Program, Dieu Donné, Brooklyn, New York
 * He received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) in 2014.
 * He is the subject of the 2016 documentary film by Lydie Diakhaté, entitled Some Bright Morning: The Art of Melvin Edwards.

Notable works in public collections

 * August the Squared Fire (1965), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
 * The Lifted X (1965), Museum of Modern Art, New York
 * The Fourth Circle (1966), Los Angeles County Museum of Art
 * Curtain (for William and Peter) (1969), Tate, London
 * Pyramid Up and Pyramid Down (1969, refabricated 2017), Whitney Museum, New York
 * Untitled (Wall Hanging) (1982), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
 * Working Thought (1985), from the series Lynch Fragments, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
 * Justice for Tropic-Ana (dedicated to Ana Mendieta) (1986), from the series Lynch Fragments, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
 * Cup of? (1988), from the series Lynch Fragments, Museum of Modern Art, New York
 * Ready Now Now (1988), from the series Lynch Fragments, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
 * Takawira - J (1989), from the series Lynch Fragments, Brooklyn Museum, New York
 * Good Word from Cayenne (1990), from the series Lynch Fragments, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
 * Tomorrow's Wind (1990), Thomas Jefferson Park, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation
 * Off and Gone (1992), from the series Lynch Fragments, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
 * Tambo (1993), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
 * Siempre Gilberto de la Nuez (1994), from the series Lynch Fragments, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
 * Deni Malick (1999), from the series Lynch Fragments, Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia
 * Fragments & Shadows (2001), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York
 * Soba (2002), from the series Lynch Fragments, Detroit Institute of Arts
 * Scales of Injustice (2017/year of exhibition), Baltimore Museum of Art