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Artworks
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup:Subliminal Horizons, Installation View, Alexander Gray Associates, New York (2021).
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup:Subliminal Horizons, Installation View, Alexander Gray Associates, New York (2021).
Melvin Edwards
Accord, 2017Welded steel and barbed wire12 1/8 x 7 1/8 x 5 in (31.11 x 18.41 x 12.7 cm)ME567$175,000Further images
Featuring hammer heads, barbed wire, chain, and a horse shoe, Accord (2017) belongs to Melvin Edwards's celebrated series of Lynch Fragments. Titled in honor of the artist's studio in Accord,...Featuring hammer heads, barbed wire, chain, and a horse shoe, Accord (2017) belongs to Melvin Edwards's celebrated series of Lynch Fragments. Titled in honor of the artist's studio in Accord, New York, the disparate objects and materials that inform the structure of Accord invite complimentary and conflicting readings of oppression, industry, creation, and violence. Edwards often incorporates chain and barbed wire into his work because of the multiple uses both materials have. (Chains, for example, while symbolizing human connections, are also tools of bondage and oppression; similarly, barbed wire is frequently used to imprison and separate populations.) Ultimately capitalizing on this disjuncture, Edwards explained to the curator Catherine Craft in 2013, “Using barbed wire, you have to be aware that it was a way to keep the cows at home. But then people turned it into concentration camps. Before it happened with Jewish people in World War II, it happened in Namibia. Those contradictions, or contradistinctions are things that have occupied me in visual art. As a way to realize the dynamic in a situation, art or otherwise, they’re very important to me.”Exhibitions
2017: Say It Loud: Art, History, Rebellion, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit MI
Literature
“A Lesson in Dead Language: Portfolio by Melvin Edwards.” Study, vol. 2, November 2022.
Sharp, Sarah Rose. “Calling Detrait’s 1967 Civil Unrest a “Rebellion,” a Museum Takes a Strong Stand.” Hyperallergic, October 22, 2017.
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