Arts & Music “You invent your own game –and then you push it forward” -Melvin Edwards, N.Y. Times He went on to teach at the Chouinard Art Institute(now known as the California Institute of the Arts), the Orange County Community College in New York, and the University of Connecticut. Melvin Edwards began teaching at Rutgers University in 1972, where he taught classes in sculpture, drawing and Third World artists, until his retirement from the school in 2002.In 1975, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. While he was teaching, he received two sequential Fulbright Fellowships, which afforded him the opportunity to travel. In 2014, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. Melvin Edwards’ work reflects his engagement with the history of race, labor, violence, as well as with themes of African Diaspora. Making welding his preferred medium, his compositions are studies in abstraction and minimalism. Melvin Edwards creates sculptures by welding metal objects such as tools, knives, hooks, and machine parts, to construct objects distinguished by formal simplicity and power. His works are characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms, often have a political content. One critic noted regarding Melvin Edwards art:”their brutish power conjures the September 2019 The URBAN EXPERIENCE 11 instruments used to subjugate African Americans during centuries of slavery and oppression”. Melvin Edwards is best known for his sculptural series Lynch Fragments, which spans three periods: the early 1960s, when he responded to racial violence in the United States; the early 1970s, when his activism concerning the Vietnam War motivated him to return to the series; and from 1978 to the present, as he continues to explore a variety of themes. Melvin Edwards has felt deeply connected to Africa and the African Diaspora since the 1970s, when-2-he and his late wife, poet Jayne Cortez, began visiting the continent. He taught metalwelding in several countries, establishing workshops and mentoring a younger generation of African welders. Melvin Edwards has had a longstanding commitment to public art, working on projects for public housing and universities since the 1960s, including Homage to My Father and the Spirit (1969) at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University,Ithaca, New York; Holder of the Light (1985) at Lafayette Gardens, Jersey City, NJ; and Asafokra (1990) at the UtsukushiGa-Hara Open-Air Museum, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. His large-scale public sculptures exemplify his extraordinary range of aesthetic expression as well as his keen commitment to abstraction. His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally. In 1993, the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY organized Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective 1963–1993, an exhibition documenting his artistic development.
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