“The Lynch Fragments have changed my life. They made this life of thirty years as a sculptor. They are the core to all the work. If anybody ever knows I lived, this is going to be why.”[i]

A passionate artist with a global, African diasporic perspective, Melvin Edwards was born in Houston, Texas in 1937 and grew up in the segregated south. When he was in high school, an art teacher introduced him to abstraction, and Edwards decided to study art in Los Angeles, a move that also offered “the only way to get out of Texas at the time.”[ii] After attending a few different universities, Edwards received a football scholarship for the University of Southern California and began his studies with the intention of focusing on painting but soon switched to sculpture. While Edwards was at USC, theories of art continued to hold on to an ideal of “pure” abstraction and the pursuit of form for its own sake in painting and sculpture. Such formalist aspirations existed in the same moment and the same country as the civil rights movement, and Edwards, who had become increasingly active in the fight for equality, immediately understood the limits of an art devoid of content. Like William T. Williams, he worked to reconcile his interest in abstraction with his passion for telling the stories of black Americans, searching for a way that abstract art could speak to historical and contemporary struggle. In 1963, as part of this search, Edwards created Some Bright Morning, the first sculpture of what would collectively become known as his Lynch Fragments. With this work, Edwards realized, “I had come onto something rooted in what I was interested in, politically and aesthetically.”[iii]

The Lynch Fragments works now number over 200, and they have become a recurring theme in Edwards’s entire body of work. Made from steel welded with various metal objects the works tread the border between representation and abstraction and invite both intellectual and visceral responses. Wall-mounted and roughly a foot in size, these dynamic assemblages appropriate everyday objects for their aesthetic purposes, but the objects they incorporate—railroad spikes, chains, machetes, axe blades, scissors, bolts, gears, hammers—typically have violent and destructive as well as creative associations. Transformed by the welding process but still recognizable as the tools of power and force, “the fragments register the moral ambiguity of treating aesthetically a material imbued with violence. As much as steel has many uses, Edwards coaxes a variety of expressive qualities out of his materials, but details [also resist] a formalist reading.”[iv] Named after a practice that used the tortured bodies of individuals as emblematic in order to terrorize an entire community and maintain a system of white supremacy, the Lynch Fragments works thus invoke and invite associations to systems of racial oppression worldwide, and they call attention to the physical force that maintains those systems of power—the use of physical pain and psychic trauma to terrorize, subjugate, humiliate, and degrade. But, the tools of violence in these works, removed from a concrete context, are also evocative of resistance and liberation through insurrection.