Takawira - J

Melvin Edwards’s weighty sculptures combine nails, tools, gears, and other metal objects to create abstract compositions. This work belongs to his extensive series Lynch Fragments, begun in the 1960s and inspired by Ralph Ginzburg’s 100 Years of Lynching (1962), a collection of newspaper reports of lynchings that was published to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War. The Lynch Fragments sculptures, generally shown suspended at eye level, evoke this history of violence through their jarring forms and rough welding.