Happy Hump Day Obots! OK, everybody do a little extra “working out” today in preparation for tomorrow!
Today’s featured artist: Sculptor Melvin Edwards
Born in Houston, TX in 1937, 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”
