Mel Edwards, Lynch Fragments
Melvin Edwards is one of America's contemporary sculptors. He works works primarily in welded steel. His sculptures include bolts, chains, gears, hammers, jacks, nails, padlocks, scissors, spikes, and wrenches. His sculptures are based of his African American heritages. He is a very successful artist and each sculpture portrays many different meanings.
Edwards has been awarded many honors. He has received 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. He has several works 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, and Los Angeles,
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He is most well known for his "Lynch Fragments" and was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. He now has more than 200 pieces in his collection.
Edwards's Lynch Fragments are abstract sculptures. It is a piece that speaks strongly critical, controversial problems but they do not represent any one thing. When I am viewing them they look very hard and dark as if it is portraying the feeling of the African American struggles during the civil rights movement. He joins more than one thing together including ideas, contexts, and cultures.
They make you feel the connection between yourself and the object, which makes you feel like the sculptures are masks or faces. The scupltures power puts off the feeling of the control over African Americans during slavery. Its compositional exchanges, sculptural unity, and poetic suggestiveness are always more persuasive than the functional reality of the objects within