Melvin Edwards : five decades
Catherine Craft (Author), Melvin Edwards (Sculptor, Artist), Alex Potts (Writer of supplementary textual content), Tobias Wofford (Writer of supplementary textual content), Leigh A. Arnold (Writer of supplementary textual content), Nasher Sculpture Center (Host institution), Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (Host institution), Columbus Museum of Art (Host institution)
"Over the past five decades, American sculptor Melvin Edwards (born 1937) has produced a remarkable body of work redefining the modernist tradition of welded sculpture. Beginning in the early 1960s with the concentrated passion of his famed Lynch Fragment series, he has created sculptures that fuse tools and other objects into powerful evocations of protest and the constructive possibilities of resistance. Beyond the Lynch Fragments, Edwards's oeuvre encompasses larger freestanding sculptures, installations, and public projects, along with a wealth of drawings, studies, and prints, and he has worked in places ranging from Los Angeles and New York to Senegal and other African nations. A truly international artist well before the advent of today's global art world, Edwards has borne witness to seminal periods of upheaval and change in American culture and society, and his career forms a critical bridge between modernist techniques and materials and contemporary approaches to the art object. Published on the occasion of a major retrospective organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, this volume presents a richly illustrated and deeply researched examination of Edwards's career. Featuring full-page color plates of more than ninety works and numerous unpublished photographs from the artist's personal archive, it reveals as never before Edwards's contributions to contemporary art and the legacy of his commitment to socially expressive abstraction. Essays by exhibition curator Catherine Craft and scholars Alex Potts and Tobias Wofford explore Edwards's formidable body of work in relation to his forerunners and contemporaries in modern sculpture, his response to the civil rights movement and ongoing support of social justice, and his engagement with artists, writers, musicians, and artisans in the United States and abroad. A compilation of conversations between Craft and Edwards offers insights into the artist's working process, and Leigh A. Arnold's illustrated catalogue -- the first of its kind -- documents Edwards's extensive career in public sculpture. A chronology, bibliography, exhibition history, and checklist provide up-to-date references for understanding and appreciating Edwards's extraordinary achievements." -- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2015
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, 2015