Melvin Edwards’s sculptures reflect his engagement with the history of race, labor, and violence, as well as with themes of the African Diaspora. His works are distinguished by their formal simplicity and powerful materiality. Featuring screws, hooks, and other industrial elements, Sopijiko (2014) is from Edwards’s Disc series. Unlike Edwards’s Lynch Fragments, the majority of these works are made in Edwards’s studio in Dakar, Senegal. However, drawing on African culture and language, they utilize a similar formal approach to the Lynch Fragments. Welding together disparate objects to address social and political issues surrounding Black identity and experience, these works evoke narratives of both creativity and brutality. As the art historian and curator Michael Brenson expands, “[sculptures like Sopijiko] are emphatic, yet wide open. … [S]pikes and nails can communicate impaling, even crucifixion, and also be a call to constructive action. Because of their compositional dynamism, almost everything destructive and oppressive … suggests the possibility of liberation.”