www.circulatesd.org:
Breaking of the Chains by Melvin Edwards was installed in 1995 and is a 25-foot by 20-foot by 15-foot polished stainless-steel sculpture.
www.polychrome.blog:
In the heart of downtown San Diego, a monumental sculpture has stood since 1995, now dwarfed by the increasing scale of the surrounding buildings. The work by well known African American artist Melvin Edwards is a large and tall metal sculpture that serves as a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and symbolizes the breaking the chains of discrimination.
www.sdaamfa.org:
Created by Melvin Edwards in 1995 in the Marina District, this large, tall, polished metal sculpture is a monument dedicated to the fight for civil rights. Etched into the footstones are selections from Dr. Martin Luther King s writings, while the sculpture itself symbolizes discrimination in America through the imagery of breaking chains. Located alongside the Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade, a linear memorial park, and across the street from the San Diego Convention Center, Breaking of the Chains can be observed from dawn to dusk and is transit accessible from the Gaslamp Quarter station.
www.wikipedia.org:
Breaking of the Chains (1995) is an outdoor public art sculpture by Mel Edwards, installed along Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade in San Diego, California.
The work is a large and tall metal sculpture that serves as a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and symbolizes the breaking the chains of discrimination. At the base of the sculpture is a plaque with a quote by Martin Luther King, reading, 'Along the way of life, someone must have the sense enough, and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives'.
www.circulatesd.org:
The plaque for the statue reads:
'Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.' Martin Luther King, Jr.
www.bombmagazine.org:
Edwards Melvin: I liked hammering, and making noise, and heating and bending things What I liked about the handling of steel was that you could make forms, and you could change them and make things with them. It's physical in ways beyond carving.
I just felt I could make something with the ways it looked like they made things. I started seeing that the backs of dump trucks were welded, and they looked like reliefs. And to this day, I say, 'I could pull off the backs of fifty dump trucks and do a show like MoMA did with the Matisse Back reliefs, and people would be into it'.
www.bombmagazine.org:
Edwards Melvin: The other thing is that composition was always very important to me. Early on, when I was studying art, the Renaissance principle of six heads to a figure or whatever it was well, once you're working abstractly, it's not that kind of dynamic. One of the things I always thought about Jacob Lawrence was that he was a great composer. I still feel that way. Now, I would say his cartoonish abstractions sometimes wouldn't have been my choice, but I understood them because teachers like Joe Mugnaini at County Art Institute talked about the dynamics of cartoons and how a lot of early cartoon history was based on geometry. You know, Mickey Mouse's round head, and then two circles for the ears, that kind of thing. Mugnaini did diagrams. Since Cubism is circle, triangle, and square or the three-dimensional version, cube, cone, pyramid let's say you've got a circle, and you've got a pure triangle, and if you put that triangle into the circle, you impact it dynamically. Those kinds of thoughts stayed with me. It often isn't the subjective that moves the internal dynamics of how I work, as much as it is thoughts like that. At the same time, in my looking at the work as it moves into finding itself, other thoughts come in. Especially in the sense of how to name it, what name is starting to grow with this thing. Sometimes it comes during the piece, sometimes afterward. Never before. You know, my corny lecture explanation of that is, making experimental art is like making a baby: everybody's busy enjoying themselves, nobody's thinking about what the baby's name will be. Laughter.
www.bombmagazine.org:
Edwards Melvin: You know, the class issue or issues, plural in American life and American art, that wasn't part of it for me. All I ever knew was people who were working class. Everybody was underpaid, and you just did what you had to do to have a job and take care of the family. I think, in a way, I just took it for granted. In fact, if sports gave me anything, it was: If you want to do something, you've got to spend a lot more time on it than other people. I was used to doing that. So people said steel was heavy. Well, shit, I was an athlete. (laughter) It wasn't an issue, is all I'm trying to say. I did like the resistance of the material. As I got to know more about making sculpture, I think I appreciated all of that more, and was glad I was a part of it. It was a good fit; I was comfortable with it..
www.hbs.edu:
Born in 1937 in Houston, Melvin Edwards moved to New York in 1967. In 1970, he became the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 1978 he had a retrospective at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Best known for his Lynch Fragments small abstract sculptures variously formed from tools, chains, railroad spikes, and steel scraps Edwards works in a wide range of media, from barbed-wire installations to large-scale painted steel sculptures. His powerful and moving sculptures engage with history and politics, exploring such themes as violence, injustice, struggle, and civil rights.
www.wikipedia.org:
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.
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.
www.sandiego.edu:
Breaking the Chains: Breaking the Silence of Black History in San Diego.
As a predominantly white city and a center of white flight, San Diego maintains a low diversity rate to this day; however, instances of tolerance are shown through events such as the erection of the Breaking the Chains statue on Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade. Not only does this commemorate the struggle of African Americans in the United States by addressing the bondage of slavery and Jim Crow laws, but it also celebrates the work of a prominent Black artist, Melvin (Mel) Edwards. As a fairly recent addition to the public art scene in San Diego, the city unveiled this sculpture in 1995. San Diego is a global hub and a huge American metropolitan area, yet it remains much whiter than other trade cities, and most of its diversity comes from Eastern Asian countries., This sculpture, contracted by the city of the San Diego, necessarily opens the eyes of many blissfully ignorant residents of the San Diego area.
As San Diego s main historically cultural source, it came as no surprise that the statue resides in the Gaslamp District in Downtown; the placement of the statue continues to speak, however, of the cultural and historic divide between San Diegans with low tolerance towards celebrating ethnic art even in an area designed after New Orleans, one of the most historically diverse and multicultural cities in the country, if not the world. The Gaslamp District is an expensive, small neighborhood with high crime rates and low education standards. The Gaslamp Quarter only houses about 1,000 of San Diego s nearly 1.5 million person population leaving most of the area s industry to dining. By placing the sculpture in the Gaslamp District, the impact remains separated from the traditionally conservative, mono-cultural community created in from the 1960s. The 2010 Census speaks for itself when noting that 58.9% of the population is white compared to the 6.7% African American population. By putting in peace offerings like this art installation, San Diego becomes a much more inviting city to minority groups including, but not limited to, Black Americans. The piece is extremely abstract; upon first sight, the sculpture might not seem meaningful or to an unexpecting or unaware viewer, but as one gets closer, they can read the engraved words on the tablet which reads, ALONG THE WAY OF LIFE SOMEONE MUST HAVE SENSE ENOUGH AND MORALITY ENOUGH TO CUT OFF THE CHAIN OF HATE. THIS CAN ONLY BE DONE BY PROJECTING THE ETHIC OF LOVE TO THE CENTER OF OUR LIVES.' This specific quote is from Dr. King s essay An Experiment in Love in which he analyzes the six pillars that uphold peaceful protest, disproves the stigmas and negative assumptions about peaceful protest, and explains how to effectively use peaceful protest for Civil Rights. This conveys a specific point to the audience about the history of civil disobedience and the place it has in the history of this country, this state, and this city. Though there is not much of a direct link between Dr. King and San Diego, his impact on Black lives (including those within San Diego) is integral to African American history and therefore deserves a place in the immortalized form of homage to the Civil Rights battle here.
This idea is right on point with Mel Edward s journey with sculpture: addressing the struggle for Black liberation and the recognition of the progress African Americans have made in American society. Edwards was born in Houston, Texas in 1937; thus, he grew up in the segregated South and was the perfect age to be an active participant and young mind during the peak of the Civil Rights movement in the United States during the 1960s. He began his artistic career at the University of Southern California during his time as an undergraduate student in their art school, and has been a prolific, successful, highly recognized African American artist ever since. Edwards was even the first Black artist to have a solo exhibit in the Whitney Museum in New York. Most of his work is based out of his time in New York City as a sculptor, illustrator, and printmaker. Breaking the Chains is one of many pieces of Edwards public art collection that pays tribute toward Civil Rights leaders, the advancement of Civil Rights, and a commentary on the status quo of Civil Rights in modern cities including San Diego. Though there is not a lot of awareness or documentation regarding the history of Civil Rights or African American culture in the San Diego area, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did visit San Diego (important as he is being paid tribute to with this sculpture) in 1964. As San Diego is a historically and culturally conservative city/area, and his visit was not welcomed with open arms. This statue and its placement function as sources of resistance to the consistent racism that San Diego has produced through its conservative, Republican history.
One of three commissioned public, tributary works, Breaking the Chains was influenced by Edwards largest project, Lynching Fragments, a collection of pieces ranging from the 1960s to the present of steel sculptures that acknowledges the Black struggle and visualizes the pain and history of violence against African Americans. This piece, while similar in meaning, displays a larger, less niche outlet for artwork that glorifies Black leaders and validates the Civil Rights movement in front of a population that rarely, if ever, commemorates that very integral, aspect of American history. This piece makes a cultural, political, and historical statement by telling citizens that Black voices will not go unheard and that the greatness that Black people can achieve cannot and will not be contained any longer. This controversial statement was historic by commission of the San Diego local government as the tradition of San Diego legislature has aired on the side of discrimination and isolation from any foreign or unfamiliar cultures or backgrounds. The first step to tolerance and education is awareness and simply by virtue of being a politically charged installation of public art, this piece does just that.
Text: Althea Ulin, May 7, 2019.
This entry was posted in Black San Diegan History by Bookmark.
Breaking of the Chains by Melvin Edwards was installed in 1995 and is a 25-foot by 20-foot by 15-foot polished stainless-steel sculpture.
www.polychrome.blog:
In the heart of downtown San Diego, a monumental sculpture has stood since 1995, now dwarfed by the increasing scale of the surrounding buildings. The work by well known African American artist Melvin Edwards is a large and tall metal sculpture that serves as a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and symbolizes the breaking the chains of discrimination.
www.sdaamfa.org:
Created by Melvin Edwards in 1995 in the Marina District, this large, tall, polished metal sculpture is a monument dedicated to the fight for civil rights. Etched into the footstones are selections from Dr. Martin Luther King s writings, while the sculpture itself symbolizes discrimination in America through the imagery of breaking chains. Located alongside the Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade, a linear memorial park, and across the street from the San Diego Convention Center, Breaking of the Chains can be observed from dawn to dusk and is transit accessible from the Gaslamp Quarter station.
www.wikipedia.org:
Breaking of the Chains (1995) is an outdoor public art sculpture by Mel Edwards, installed along Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade in San Diego, California.
The work is a large and tall metal sculpture that serves as a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and symbolizes the breaking the chains of discrimination. At the base of the sculpture is a plaque with a quote by Martin Luther King, reading, 'Along the way of life, someone must have the sense enough, and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives'.
www.circulatesd.org:
The plaque for the statue reads:
'Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.' Martin Luther King, Jr.
www.bombmagazine.org:
Edwards Melvin: I liked hammering, and making noise, and heating and bending things What I liked about the handling of steel was that you could make forms, and you could change them and make things with them. It's physical in ways beyond carving.
I just felt I could make something with the ways it looked like they made things. I started seeing that the backs of dump trucks were welded, and they looked like reliefs. And to this day, I say, 'I could pull off the backs of fifty dump trucks and do a show like MoMA did with the Matisse Back reliefs, and people would be into it'.
www.bombmagazine.org:
Edwards Melvin: The other thing is that composition was always very important to me. Early on, when I was studying art, the Renaissance principle of six heads to a figure or whatever it was well, once you're working abstractly, it's not that kind of dynamic. One of the things I always thought about Jacob Lawrence was that he was a great composer. I still feel that way. Now, I would say his cartoonish abstractions sometimes wouldn't have been my choice, but I understood them because teachers like Joe Mugnaini at County Art Institute talked about the dynamics of cartoons and how a lot of early cartoon history was based on geometry. You know, Mickey Mouse's round head, and then two circles for the ears, that kind of thing. Mugnaini did diagrams. Since Cubism is circle, triangle, and square or the three-dimensional version, cube, cone, pyramid let's say you've got a circle, and you've got a pure triangle, and if you put that triangle into the circle, you impact it dynamically. Those kinds of thoughts stayed with me. It often isn't the subjective that moves the internal dynamics of how I work, as much as it is thoughts like that. At the same time, in my looking at the work as it moves into finding itself, other thoughts come in. Especially in the sense of how to name it, what name is starting to grow with this thing. Sometimes it comes during the piece, sometimes afterward. Never before. You know, my corny lecture explanation of that is, making experimental art is like making a baby: everybody's busy enjoying themselves, nobody's thinking about what the baby's name will be. Laughter.
www.bombmagazine.org:
Edwards Melvin: You know, the class issue or issues, plural in American life and American art, that wasn't part of it for me. All I ever knew was people who were working class. Everybody was underpaid, and you just did what you had to do to have a job and take care of the family. I think, in a way, I just took it for granted. In fact, if sports gave me anything, it was: If you want to do something, you've got to spend a lot more time on it than other people. I was used to doing that. So people said steel was heavy. Well, shit, I was an athlete. (laughter) It wasn't an issue, is all I'm trying to say. I did like the resistance of the material. As I got to know more about making sculpture, I think I appreciated all of that more, and was glad I was a part of it. It was a good fit; I was comfortable with it..
www.hbs.edu:
Born in 1937 in Houston, Melvin Edwards moved to New York in 1967. In 1970, he became the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 1978 he had a retrospective at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Best known for his Lynch Fragments small abstract sculptures variously formed from tools, chains, railroad spikes, and steel scraps Edwards works in a wide range of media, from barbed-wire installations to large-scale painted steel sculptures. His powerful and moving sculptures engage with history and politics, exploring such themes as violence, injustice, struggle, and civil rights.
www.wikipedia.org:
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.
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.
www.sandiego.edu:
Breaking the Chains: Breaking the Silence of Black History in San Diego.
As a predominantly white city and a center of white flight, San Diego maintains a low diversity rate to this day; however, instances of tolerance are shown through events such as the erection of the Breaking the Chains statue on Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade. Not only does this commemorate the struggle of African Americans in the United States by addressing the bondage of slavery and Jim Crow laws, but it also celebrates the work of a prominent Black artist, Melvin (Mel) Edwards. As a fairly recent addition to the public art scene in San Diego, the city unveiled this sculpture in 1995. San Diego is a global hub and a huge American metropolitan area, yet it remains much whiter than other trade cities, and most of its diversity comes from Eastern Asian countries., This sculpture, contracted by the city of the San Diego, necessarily opens the eyes of many blissfully ignorant residents of the San Diego area.
As San Diego s main historically cultural source, it came as no surprise that the statue resides in the Gaslamp District in Downtown; the placement of the statue continues to speak, however, of the cultural and historic divide between San Diegans with low tolerance towards celebrating ethnic art even in an area designed after New Orleans, one of the most historically diverse and multicultural cities in the country, if not the world. The Gaslamp District is an expensive, small neighborhood with high crime rates and low education standards. The Gaslamp Quarter only houses about 1,000 of San Diego s nearly 1.5 million person population leaving most of the area s industry to dining. By placing the sculpture in the Gaslamp District, the impact remains separated from the traditionally conservative, mono-cultural community created in from the 1960s. The 2010 Census speaks for itself when noting that 58.9% of the population is white compared to the 6.7% African American population. By putting in peace offerings like this art installation, San Diego becomes a much more inviting city to minority groups including, but not limited to, Black Americans. The piece is extremely abstract; upon first sight, the sculpture might not seem meaningful or to an unexpecting or unaware viewer, but as one gets closer, they can read the engraved words on the tablet which reads, ALONG THE WAY OF LIFE SOMEONE MUST HAVE SENSE ENOUGH AND MORALITY ENOUGH TO CUT OFF THE CHAIN OF HATE. THIS CAN ONLY BE DONE BY PROJECTING THE ETHIC OF LOVE TO THE CENTER OF OUR LIVES.' This specific quote is from Dr. King s essay An Experiment in Love in which he analyzes the six pillars that uphold peaceful protest, disproves the stigmas and negative assumptions about peaceful protest, and explains how to effectively use peaceful protest for Civil Rights. This conveys a specific point to the audience about the history of civil disobedience and the place it has in the history of this country, this state, and this city. Though there is not much of a direct link between Dr. King and San Diego, his impact on Black lives (including those within San Diego) is integral to African American history and therefore deserves a place in the immortalized form of homage to the Civil Rights battle here.
This idea is right on point with Mel Edward s journey with sculpture: addressing the struggle for Black liberation and the recognition of the progress African Americans have made in American society. Edwards was born in Houston, Texas in 1937; thus, he grew up in the segregated South and was the perfect age to be an active participant and young mind during the peak of the Civil Rights movement in the United States during the 1960s. He began his artistic career at the University of Southern California during his time as an undergraduate student in their art school, and has been a prolific, successful, highly recognized African American artist ever since. Edwards was even the first Black artist to have a solo exhibit in the Whitney Museum in New York. Most of his work is based out of his time in New York City as a sculptor, illustrator, and printmaker. Breaking the Chains is one of many pieces of Edwards public art collection that pays tribute toward Civil Rights leaders, the advancement of Civil Rights, and a commentary on the status quo of Civil Rights in modern cities including San Diego. Though there is not a lot of awareness or documentation regarding the history of Civil Rights or African American culture in the San Diego area, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did visit San Diego (important as he is being paid tribute to with this sculpture) in 1964. As San Diego is a historically and culturally conservative city/area, and his visit was not welcomed with open arms. This statue and its placement function as sources of resistance to the consistent racism that San Diego has produced through its conservative, Republican history.
One of three commissioned public, tributary works, Breaking the Chains was influenced by Edwards largest project, Lynching Fragments, a collection of pieces ranging from the 1960s to the present of steel sculptures that acknowledges the Black struggle and visualizes the pain and history of violence against African Americans. This piece, while similar in meaning, displays a larger, less niche outlet for artwork that glorifies Black leaders and validates the Civil Rights movement in front of a population that rarely, if ever, commemorates that very integral, aspect of American history. This piece makes a cultural, political, and historical statement by telling citizens that Black voices will not go unheard and that the greatness that Black people can achieve cannot and will not be contained any longer. This controversial statement was historic by commission of the San Diego local government as the tradition of San Diego legislature has aired on the side of discrimination and isolation from any foreign or unfamiliar cultures or backgrounds. The first step to tolerance and education is awareness and simply by virtue of being a politically charged installation of public art, this piece does just that.
Text: Althea Ulin, May 7, 2019.
This entry was posted in Black San Diegan History by Bookmark.