Brooklyn Museum: Contemporary Art: Takawira

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Takawira - J

Sculpture was more physical than painting. It seemed to me a more direct way to deal with the inner subject. Sculpture allowed me to put in, in a more natural way, things that people were saying you weren't supposed to put in art, like race and politics. It allowed me to think more literally in those ways but have it come out in the work abstractly.

-Melvin Edwards, quoted in Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, 1963-1993 (1993)

This work from Melvin Edwards's extensive Lynch Fragment series of welded metal relief sculptures was made while he was teaching in Zimbabwe and was named for John Takawira, a sculptor he met there.

Artist: Melvin Edwards, American, born 1937
Medium: Welded steel
Dates: 1989
Dimensions: 14 x 10 x 9 in.
Collections: Contemporary Art
Museum Location: This item is on view in American Identities: A New Look, Everyday Life/A Nation Divided, 5th Floor
Accession Number: 1990.104
Credit Line: Gift of Edward A. Bragaline, by exchange
Image: Overall, 1990.104_bw.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph