Topic: ART NEWS
“It is a rare privilege for the Zimmerli to host this review of Edwards’s career—a career marked by powerful steps forward in the form of contemporary sculpture and by innovation and courage in the presentation of pivotal historical and political issues within the modernist context,” commented Marti Mayo, the Zimmerli’s interim director.
The retrospective’s stop at the Zimmerli represents a triumphant return for the artist to New Brunswick: Edwards was a professor at Rutgersfrom 1972 to 2002, teaching sculpture, drawing, and an introduction to Third World artists. His sculpture Education Is an Open Book (1987) is located on the Livingston Campus as part of the university’s public sculpture collection that spans all campuses.
Richard S. Edwards, Chancellor, Rutgers—New Brunswick, said, “Mel Edwards was an important professor at Rutgers, teaching for 30 years in our Mason Gross School of the Arts, and we are especially proud to be one of the venues on the national tour of this exhibition. The artist’s studios in nearby Plainfield, New Jersey, as well as in Dakhar, Senegal, can be seen to represent both the local and global influences and interests of Rutgers.”
Melvin Edwards: Five Decades bears witness to Edwards’s profound commitment, from the very beginning of his career, to an art that is both abstract and deeply engaged with meaning and expression. A truly international artist well before the advent of today’s global art world, Edwards has brought his experiences of other cultures and languages, particularly those of Africa, into his work, to explore the varied ways that art can forge bonds of connection and kinship. He is best known for his Lynch Fragments, an ongoing series of small-scale reliefs begun in Los Angeles in the early 1960s and born out of the social and political turmoil of the civil rights movement. Incorporating tools and other familiar objects, such as chains, locks, and ax heads, Edwards’s Lynch Fragments are abstract yet evocative, summoning a range of artistic, cultural, and historical references.
Melvin Edwards: Five Decades features a broad selection of Lynch Fragments, beginning with early manifestations, which spoke to the racial tensions and political and cultural struggles of the 1960s. Edwards returned to the series in the early 1970s during the Vietnam War and continued it with a later group, beginning in 1978 and continuing to the present that explores memory, history, and African and African American culture.
Presenting a full range of Edwards’s achievements, Melvin Edwards: Five Decades – the first retrospective of his work in more than 20 years – reveals that his career has extended far beyond the Lynch Fragments. Major large-scale sculptures of the 1960s, such as Chaino, The Lifted X, and August the Squared Fire, are included, as well as his Rockers of the 1970s, which incorporate movement and, in some cases, sound.
With the artist’s cooperation, the Zimmerli will recreate the groundbreaking 1970 exhibition of his barbed-wire sculptures originally shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Several large sculptures have been restored for the exhibition, most notably the first Rocker,Homage to Coco, which was in the 1970 Whitney sculpture annual. Also on view will be sculpture Edwards made in Senegal over the past decade, a selection of maquettes and prototypes reflecting his long career in public sculpture, and rarely exhibited works on paper, including sketchbooks and collaborations with the artist’s late wife, the celebrated poet and performer Jayne Cortez.
