Artist:
Melvin Edwards
Title:
Song of the Broken Chains
Year:
2020
Adress:
DeCordova Sculpture Park
Website:
www.dlgvisa.com:
Titled Song of the Broken Chains, this new sculpture consists of several enormous chain links, broken open and glittering in the sunlight. All of the sculptures in the retrospective include chains in some form, as chains are a signature motif for the artist. In his work, he utilizes the formal qualities of chains their movement, shape, and weight while exploring the various metaphorical meanings of the material. In Edwards work, chains can represent bonds that [either] constrain or unite us, while broken fragments might suggest [either] liberation or loss. Often present in his work is also the clear historical connection to chains as tools of slavery and violence. His most recent piece has a sense of optimism, with the broken chain links suggesting both liberation and rupture, shining brightly on the site of both a colonial African Burial Ground and New York s Black Lives Matter protests.
www.stephenfriedman.com:
Song of the Broken Chains evokes Edwards optimistic view of our shared future. This was Edwards first thematic survey of outdoor sculptures and deCordova s first outdoor solo exhibition in many years, according to the sculpture park.
The broken links also a recurring feature of his Lynch Fragments are not the annoying disrupters that you sometimes encounter on my website. They symbolize release from the chains of slavery and imprisonment. But (as you can hear Edwards say in the video at the bottom of this post) they can also symbolize linkage, connections generation to generation.
In deCordova the burnished, welded stainless steel is sparkling in the sumnmer sunlight.
www.theartnewspaper.com:
Mel talks about the chain as being this literal motif that is about oppression and restraint but also about linkages of inter-connectivity between generations, between communities, between individuals, says Daniel Palmer, the curator. He proposed installing the exhibition outside City Hall, because of its history as an African burial ground in the colonial era and the commons where the Declaration of Independence was first read aloud to an audience.
Thinking about the motif of the rocker as this historical back and forth, Palmer says, this site just felt like it worked on so many levels and is even more meaningful right now with everything going on in the city.
Raised in Houston under segregation the city where Floyd also grew up his life easily could be mine, Edwards reflects. I saw the picture him, which had him in the football jersey of my rival high school. He was very familiar. Edwards played football at the University of Southern California but chose to pursue art there under the mentorship of the Hungarian painter Francis de Erdely. Edwards's experience as an athlete has always informed his sculpture and consideration of balance, motion and poise.
www.theartnewspaper.com:
Song of the Broken Chains dismantles the anatomy of a chain. This includes a perfect figure 8 between two oversized links and other configurations where linkages are taken apart.
www.bombmagazine.org:
Edwards Melvin: I think what attracted me about it was I always liked work that had dynamics to it, that had or implied strength or aggressiveness. My thinking had already turned to abstraction, not in a purist sense, but in a sense that you could work beyond just imitating the figure as a basis for what you were doing. Anyway, when you're working with scrap steel, it's not like a sheet of paper you draw on, you actually turn what you have into something else. That fit with how I was thinking.
It's almost like my sense of abstraction had an abstract figuration, I don't mean in the imitation of figure, but in the sense of mountains, backs, shoulders, muscularities. I always liked three dimensions, in drawing and painting; I paid attention to chiaroscuro and the formalities of form in the Renaissance. Even when I wasn't working in that kind of figurative way, in my head, it helped the dynamics of what I was doing, the power. I used to say to myself, Well, you like football, and things that are forceful. When I thought of painters I liked, they had one or another variation of that power: the Mexican painters, and Goya; Michelangelo. I wasn't that crazy about his paintings, but I liked the power within the figure, within the form. Donatello was more my style. That carved wood one.
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.moma.org:
Edwards s Lynch Fragment Series responds to a legacy of oppression. While the series name explicitly refers to the history of violence toward African Americans in the United States, the sculptures individual titles often relate them to a person or place in Namibia or Zimbabwe. The welded steel forms evoke chains, locks, handcuffs, and farming equipment. Each sculpture, roughly the size of a human head, confronts the viewer face to face. Edwards begun the collection at the height of the civil rights movement, in 1963 the year of the March on Washington and of President Kennedy s assassination.
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.
Titled Song of the Broken Chains, this new sculpture consists of several enormous chain links, broken open and glittering in the sunlight. All of the sculptures in the retrospective include chains in some form, as chains are a signature motif for the artist. In his work, he utilizes the formal qualities of chains their movement, shape, and weight while exploring the various metaphorical meanings of the material. In Edwards work, chains can represent bonds that [either] constrain or unite us, while broken fragments might suggest [either] liberation or loss. Often present in his work is also the clear historical connection to chains as tools of slavery and violence. His most recent piece has a sense of optimism, with the broken chain links suggesting both liberation and rupture, shining brightly on the site of both a colonial African Burial Ground and New York s Black Lives Matter protests.
www.stephenfriedman.com:
Song of the Broken Chains evokes Edwards optimistic view of our shared future. This was Edwards first thematic survey of outdoor sculptures and deCordova s first outdoor solo exhibition in many years, according to the sculpture park.
The broken links also a recurring feature of his Lynch Fragments are not the annoying disrupters that you sometimes encounter on my website. They symbolize release from the chains of slavery and imprisonment. But (as you can hear Edwards say in the video at the bottom of this post) they can also symbolize linkage, connections generation to generation.
In deCordova the burnished, welded stainless steel is sparkling in the sumnmer sunlight.
www.theartnewspaper.com:
Mel talks about the chain as being this literal motif that is about oppression and restraint but also about linkages of inter-connectivity between generations, between communities, between individuals, says Daniel Palmer, the curator. He proposed installing the exhibition outside City Hall, because of its history as an African burial ground in the colonial era and the commons where the Declaration of Independence was first read aloud to an audience.
Thinking about the motif of the rocker as this historical back and forth, Palmer says, this site just felt like it worked on so many levels and is even more meaningful right now with everything going on in the city.
Raised in Houston under segregation the city where Floyd also grew up his life easily could be mine, Edwards reflects. I saw the picture him, which had him in the football jersey of my rival high school. He was very familiar. Edwards played football at the University of Southern California but chose to pursue art there under the mentorship of the Hungarian painter Francis de Erdely. Edwards's experience as an athlete has always informed his sculpture and consideration of balance, motion and poise.
www.theartnewspaper.com:
Song of the Broken Chains dismantles the anatomy of a chain. This includes a perfect figure 8 between two oversized links and other configurations where linkages are taken apart.
www.bombmagazine.org:
Edwards Melvin: I think what attracted me about it was I always liked work that had dynamics to it, that had or implied strength or aggressiveness. My thinking had already turned to abstraction, not in a purist sense, but in a sense that you could work beyond just imitating the figure as a basis for what you were doing. Anyway, when you're working with scrap steel, it's not like a sheet of paper you draw on, you actually turn what you have into something else. That fit with how I was thinking.
It's almost like my sense of abstraction had an abstract figuration, I don't mean in the imitation of figure, but in the sense of mountains, backs, shoulders, muscularities. I always liked three dimensions, in drawing and painting; I paid attention to chiaroscuro and the formalities of form in the Renaissance. Even when I wasn't working in that kind of figurative way, in my head, it helped the dynamics of what I was doing, the power. I used to say to myself, Well, you like football, and things that are forceful. When I thought of painters I liked, they had one or another variation of that power: the Mexican painters, and Goya; Michelangelo. I wasn't that crazy about his paintings, but I liked the power within the figure, within the form. Donatello was more my style. That carved wood one.
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.moma.org:
Edwards s Lynch Fragment Series responds to a legacy of oppression. While the series name explicitly refers to the history of violence toward African Americans in the United States, the sculptures individual titles often relate them to a person or place in Namibia or Zimbabwe. The welded steel forms evoke chains, locks, handcuffs, and farming equipment. Each sculpture, roughly the size of a human head, confronts the viewer face to face. Edwards begun the collection at the height of the civil rights movement, in 1963 the year of the March on Washington and of President Kennedy s assassination.
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.