Melvin Edwards began his seminal and ongoing Lynch Fragments series in 1963, the year that the civil rights movement reached a crescendo with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. These small-scale works are assembled from farm tools and other found and fabricated steel objects. The artist’s signature material, steel is strong and rigid, suggesting oppression and violence as readily as toughness and resistance.
Edwards moved to New York from Los Angeles in 1967, developing his sculptural vocabulary throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He created both large- and small-scale objects, visibly muscled together or manipulated into graceful lines, rusty or brightly hued.
This artwork is dedicated to the Black artist Ed Clark. In 1957 Clark exhibited the first shaped-canvas paintings, a breakthrough that was overlooked at the time and instead attributed to a handful of white artists.