Melvin Edwards is best known for his sculptures made from found metal objects such as steel parts, chain, and barbed wire. His works include small wall constructions, large floor objects, and outdoor public monuments. Born in Houston in 1937, Edwards attended Wheatley Senior High School. In 1953 he was among the first African-American students at the Glassell School of Art, the teaching wing of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Edwards moved to Los Angeles in 1955 and graduated from the University of Southern California in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He soon became a prolific and successful artist, receiving numerous awards. Edwards has been on the faculty of Rutgers University since 1972 and has served as guest lecturer at many other universities. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as a major retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, New York.
Edwards’s ongoing series Lynch Fragments consists of almost two hundred wall-mounted sculptures that transform found metal objects into compact abstract forms. In Good Word from Cayenne, the artist combines various found metals—including a bolt, rebar, a length of chain, a large hook, and steel stock—to create an extraordinarily succinct composition. While representing an assemblage of individual parts, Good Word from Cayenne also demonstrates Edwards’s ability to manipulate the perception of space.
Begun in 1963, the Lynch Fragments series was prompted by the violence of the civil rights era and the lynching—both literal and metaphorical—of African-Americans. However, each sculpture contains its own story. Good Word from Cayenne is dedicated to Edwards’s friend, the poet Léon Gontran Damas, who was born in Cayenne, French Guyana. Educated in France, Damas used his poetry to speak out against the racial barriers that obstructed black students in that country. Later in his life, the poet moved to Washington, D.C., where he became a professor at Howard University.
In this small, dense work, the prominent heavy chain serves as a metaphor both for slavery and for the defiant spirit of the African-American people. It is worth noting that among the Yoruba people of Nigeria, the chain is an emblem of membership in the Ogboni society. The chain also links male and female. Additionally, it represents the connection between African-Americans and their African roots.
Edwards was influenced not only by the welded-metal sculptures of the Spaniard Julio Gonzàlez (1876–1942) and the American David Smith (1906–1965), but also by the social content of their works. He has said of his transition from painter to sculptor, which occurred during the early 1960s, that “sculpture was more physical than painting. It seemed to me a more direct way to deal with the inner subject. Sculpture allowed me to put in, in a more natural way, things that people were saying you weren’t supposed to put in art, like race and politics. It allowed me to think more literally in those ways but have it come out in the work abstractly.”
When viewing Edwards’s work, it is important to consider the history that shaped the artist’s creative and aesthetic approach. Although Edwards was artistically influenced by the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s, his art also represents his personal experiences as a young African-American man. The momentous and life-changing historical events of the 1960s—such as the civil rights movement, race riots, and the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.—had an enormous impact on Edwards’s art. In this sculpture, the abstraction of the combined industrial parts serves to visually synthesize those experiences.
