Description

Melvin or “Mel” Edwards creates serious yet playful work using steel, chains, and barbed wire. Born in 1937 in the segregated South, Edwards studied art at the University of Southern California, which he attended on a football scholarship. In 1963 he made his first “Lynch Fragment,” a small welded sculpture created in the spirit of improvised jazz. His Lynch Fragment series now numbers over 200. This 1995 State of the Arts story goes on location with Edwards in his Plainfield, New Jersey studio, and to his 30-year retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York.

Produced by Susan Wallner; Narrated by Amber Edwards.