CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/19/2020

Pieces of life and shards of history in 'Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments'

"Some Bright Morning" (1963) is reproduced from Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments, a 50-year retrospective of the artist's riveting, politically-charged steel sculptures. "Edwards’ personal memories and biography, stemming from his growing up in the highly racist and segregated United States, are part and parcel with the collective stories surrounding that cultural environment in the mid-20th century," Rodrigo Moura writes. "Shovels, axes, rakes, and horseshoes evoke the rural context of the U.S. South, where the artist’s ancestors settled and where he spent part of his childhood, at his grandmother’s house in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas, a community of African descendants and Latino immigrants. The relationships between body and machine are present through the use of structures resembling gears that also suggest an intricate relationship between the individual and society. The artist is the subject of memories that relate to a broad historical panel of cultural exchanges and power relations involving the peoples of Africa, America and Europe. The notion of fragment is fundamental: the sculptures are pieces of life and shards of history."