Mel Edwards
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| Melvin Edwards | |
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| Born | July 17, 1939 Houston, Texas |
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| Nationality | American |
| Profession | Sculptor |
| Website | Official website |
Mel Edwards is one of America's foremost contemporary sculptors. Since 1965, when his first one-person exhibition was mounted at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, he has been honored with more than a dozen one-person show exhibits and been in over four dozen group shows. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the L. A. County Museum, Los Angeles, California, and the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey. A 30-year retrospective of his sculpture was held in 1993 at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. Several of his works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, the Museum of Modem Art, New York City, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, and the L. A. County Museum, Los Angeles, California. His sculpture has been highlighted internationally in major exhibitions from Paris to Japan. In addition, the importance of his work has been recognized by his receipt of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship to Zimbabwe, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His research into Third World visual culture has taken him to Morocco, Brazil, China, Cuba, and Nigeria. Inspiration for Edwards comes from his ancestral home, Africa, where he currently spends several months each year working as a sculptor in Senegal. He is a resident of New York City, and is represented by CDS Gallery located on 76 East 19th Street in New York City. He holds a B.F.A. Degree from the University of Southern California and has studied at Los Angeles City College, and the Los Angeles County Art Institute. Besides achieving a prestigious career as a sculptor. Professor Edwards has realized a distinguished 40-year teaching career. In 1964, he began teaching at San Bemadino Valley College. He went on to teach at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of Arts), the Orange County Community College in New York, and the University of Connecticut. In 1972 he began teaching at Rutgers University, where he taught classes in sculpture, drawing and Third World artists until his retirement from the school in 2002. Mel Edwards is known for creating sculpture that fuses the political with the abstract as it addresses his African American heritage. Drawing upon African sources as well as the western modernist tradition of welded steel sculpture, Edwards has created a profound and beautiful body of art. He is most well known for his "Lynch Fragments". Inspired by 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. There are now more than 200 pieces in the series. A variety of metal objects including hammer heads, scissors, locks, chains and railroad splices, are employed as the raw materials for these works. They are welded together in compositions that emanate intense visual and structural energy. The sculptures, usually no more that a foot tall, are hung on the wall at eye level. Their directly viewed installation increases the sense of one-on-one confrontation generated between the viewer and the object, creating an Impression that the sculptures are masks or faces. One critic noted "their brutish power conjures the instruments used to subjugate African Americans during centuries of slavery and oppression." Edwards is also known for his large public sculpture, smaller freestanding works, the kinetic "Rockers" series, and works executed in the medium of printmaking. His large-scale works include "Mt. Vernon" and "Homage to Billy Holliday and the Young Ones at Soweto"
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