PROMINENT ALUMNI

Melvin Edwards,
Sculptor

Melvin Edwards is one of America’s foremost contemporary sculptors. He is noted for art work that fuses the political with the abstract as it addresses his African American heritage.

Drawing upon African sources as well as the western modernist tradition of welded steel sculpture, Edwards has created a profound body of art.

He is most well known for his “Lynch Fragments.” Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, these small-scale welded metal wall reliefs developed in three periods: 1963 to 1967, 1973 to 1974, and 1978 to the present. Other important pieces are a large public sculpture, smaller freestanding works, and the kinetic “Rockers” series, as well as works in the area of printmaking. His large scale works include “Mt. Vernon” and “Homage to Billy Holliday and the Young Ones at Soweto.”

In 1993, a 30-year retrospective of his sculpture work was held at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y. Several of his pieces are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the LA County Museum of Art. In addition, he has had major exhibitions from Paris to Japan and he received a Fulbright fellowship to Zimbabwe. The importance of his work has been recognized by a Guggenheim fellowship.