Lynch Fragments is the title of a series of abstract metal sculptures created by artist Melvin Edwards. The artist began the series in 1963 and has continued it over the course of his entire career, aside from two periods in the 1960s and 1970s. The sculptures in the series are small, usually wall-based assemblages of metal scraps and objects such as spikes, chains, and scissors, welded together in various combinations.
The title of the series alludes to the practice of lynching in the United States. Edwards, an African-American artist who grew up in both an integrated community in Ohio and a segregated community in Texas, has described the works as metaphors for both the violence inflicted on black people in the U.S., and the power and struggles of African Americans fighting against that violence. Additionally, many of the works also explicitly reference African and African-American history, contemporary political events, and notable figures from Edwards' life and studies in their titles.
Critics and art historians have interpreted the works in the series in a variety of ways, with some highlighting the possible sociocultural and historical allusions in the underlying materials and titles, and others arguing that the works are examples of formalist abstraction whose meanings are primarily visual rather than political. The pieces in the series, numbering around 300 sculptures, are among Edwards' best-known and most widely lauded works.
Background and history
Melvin Edwards, an African-American sculptor making abstract art, had been experimenting with welding small metal scraps together for several years in the early 1960s, while living in Los Angeles.[2] In 1963, this experimentation resulted in a small relief sculpture that began his Lynch Fragments series.[2][3] The first work in the series, titled Some Bright Morning, comprises a shallow cylindrical form accented by bits of steel, a blade-shaped triangle of metal, and a short chain hanging from the piece with a small lump of steel at its end.[2]
Edwards began the series during an increase in activity in the civil rights movement, as well as a rise in public awareness of lynchings and racially motivated violence targeted toward African Americans.[2][3] He had recently read several news reports and stories about various contemporary and historical lynchings and instances of attempted violence across the country, including Ralph Ginzburg's anthology 100 Years of Lynchings, a compilation of reports published in 1962.[2][4] The first sculpture in the series is titled Some Bright Morning, in reference to an account in Ginzburg's anthology.[5] Writing in 1982, Edwards described the narrative of the referenced story:
"Some Bright Morning is a piece dedicated to a black family in Florida who had been warned by white people not to be so militant. The family continued to be militant until the white people said that some bright morning they were coming to get them, and when they came, the black people were armed and ready. They fought and then took to the swamp in guerilla warfare against those whites and they didn't lose."
— Melvin Edwards, "Lynch Fragments", in Buhle, Paul, et al. (eds.). Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination (1982).[6]
Edwards has referenced the Florida story from Ginzburg's anthology several times as the source of the quote "some bright morning", but the phrase actually originated in a different story from Ginzburg's book. The original source of the quote is the story of a farmer in Georgia who was lynched in 1919 after attempting to engage in labor organizing in his community.[7]
Having grown up in urban communities somewhat protected from more violent racism in rural areas, Edwards did not witness or have experiences directly connected with lynching in his early life.[2] While few of the works reference specific instances of lynching, Edwards chose to use the title in order to bring "that scale of intensity and that kind of power" to each work in the series.[8] Describing the meaning of the series' title in 1993 as it relates to his own experiences, Edwards said:
"Basically, lynching didn't take place in a volatile city like Houston with its large black population. [...] I didn't think about lynching per se. Now what I thought about was police brutality. But you knew that when you got to rural places that kind of danger was possible. The title of the series is, in a sense, a metaphor for the whole struggle and the point that I took it had a lot to do with the fact that the level of struggle necessary to make things just had to be up to the level that it was unjust. My effort in sculpture had to be as intense as injustice, in the reverse."
— Melvin Edwards, quoted in Brenson, Michael, "Lynch Fragments", in Gedeon, Lucinda H. (ed.). Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, 1963–1993 (1993).[9]
Edwards identified several other artists as inspirations for the series, including the welded sculpture of David Smith and the work of Theodore Roszak.[10]
After moving from Los Angeles to New York in January 1967, Edwards stopped making new Lynch Fragments sculptures.[11][12] As he said, "I felt I had gotten good esthetic mileage out of them that I wasn't getting as much out of the larger-scale pieces," so he turned his focus to his other bodies of work.[11] He has also said that the move from California offered him an opportunity to develop beyond his old work: "That first convenience of the move from California to New York, was, well, you could close the door on the period, just by moving three thousand miles."[12]
Edwards began making sculptures for the series again in 1973, largely as a response to pro-segregation demonstrations in New York and a rise in attacks on black people in his neighborhood, SoHo.[13][14] The Lynch Fragments works from this period are slightly larger than the earlier sculptures and extend further off the wall.[11][13] Art historian Catherine Craft characterized the sculptures from 1973 as "more physically aggressive".[13] By the end of the year, Edwards had stopped making the sculptures once again, feeling that the works "were so obsessive in their making that I couldn't develop other ideas..."[11]
In 1978, Edwards mounted a retrospective exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which gave him the opportunity to view a large number of the Lynch Fragments sculptures together for the first time in several years.[11][15] This inspired him to start making new sculptures for the series: "I said, you do have plenty of ideas. After the show was over, I said, why cut it off, just find a way, shit."[11] In addition, his new position teaching art at Rutgers University afforded him more stability and the funds for a larger studio, allowing him to experiment more with the series.[16] Craft described Edwards' choice to begin work on the series again as "motivated by creative rather than political urgency", although several of the Lynch Fragments sculptures from post-1978 do reference current events in their titles, including references to the Soweto uprising and the Iraq War.[16]
Since restarting the series in 1978, Edwards continued to produce new Lynch Fragments sculptures throughout his career.[17][1] The series included more than 300 sculptures as of 2024.[18] The pieces in the series are among Edwards' best-known and celebrated and have been cited by several authors as his breakthrough or signature works.[19][10][20][21]
Speaking in 1993 about the importance of the series to his overall career, Edwards said: "The Lynch Fragments have changed my life. They made this life of thirty years as a sculptor. They are the core to all the work. If anybody ever knows I lived, this is going to be why."[22]
Description
Edwards has used an array of metal objects and materials to create the sculptures, including whole or severed axes, barbed wire, bolts, car parts, chains, farm tools, gears, hammers, horseshoes, jacks, knives, nails, padlocks, rakes, scissors, shovels, spikes, and wrenches.[23][24][3] The sculptures are usually wall-based, although some works in the series are displayed on pedestals.[3] Most of the works are small, generally around the size of a human head,[25][24] and are usually installed around eye-level six feet high, what he called a "natural height".[25]
Edwards described his ideal installation for exhibiting the sculptures, saying the works needed to be spaced three feet apart, preferably installed in groups of multiples of 16, and ideally exhibited in a circular space "because the feeling of the pieces in the space will be more spatial."[25] He developed this installation structure after his first solo museum exhibition in 1965 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; his Lynch Fragments sculptures in that exhibition were installed fairly haphazardly by museum staff without his input, leading him to think more deeply about a preferred installation technique.[26]
Reception and analysis
A range of critics, curators, and art historians have written in different terms about their experiences with and understanding of the series. In 2024, art critic Michael Brenson argued that Edwards "wants viewers to respond to them vividly, in ways that reveal their multiplicity, and we do."[18] Critic Michael Kimmelman, writing in The New York Times, said the sculptures had an "intense and concentrated energy",[27] and Nancy Princenthal, writing in Art in America, said that "these sculptures seem ready to detonate on contact".[28] Similarly, critic Jonathan Goodman, writing in artcritical, said the sculptures were "eloquent but also brutalized shards of content [that] feel as though they are ready to explode."[29] Critic William Zimmer wrote in the Times that the works give "the impression that they aren't achieved as much by sweat work as by natural, albeit mystical, accretion."[19] Critic and poet Nancy Morejón, writing about the sculptures in The Black Scholar, "found in them indescribable truth and beauty", and highlighted the tactile nature of the works, saying that she wanted "to be able to touch the magic substance that formed these fragments".[30]
Brenson and curator Rodrigo Moura have both noted that the consistent presence of chains and padlocks in the sculptures is meant to signify slavery and bondage, as well as the positive connections and bonds between people.[31][32] Writing in 1993, Brenson posited that the sculptures in the series are resolutely abstract and "do not represent any one thing".[23] According to Brenson, although they somewhat resemble references to African masks and carry the associations of their materials – metal objects with a past use – the works' "compositional exchanges, sculptural unity, and poetic suggestiveness are always more persuasive than the functional reality of the objects within them."[23] Curator April Kingsley, writing in 1981, said the early work from the series "looks very much like it came full-formed out of nowhere".[33] Artist Rudolf Baranik, expounding on Kingsley's observation, wrote that while viewers could attempt to discern historical meaning in the individual items comprising the sculptures, "it would only hinder the understanding."[34]
Critic Barry Schwabsky, writing in The Nation, argued that the main focus of the sculptures was their visual presence as opposed to their social content: "The associative connotations, though inexpungible, remain secondary [...] Instead, the artist’s fascination with the formal experience of art seems paramount."[35] Likewise, writing in Art Papers, critic Clarence D. White said that although the sculptures "owe their power primarily to the political and social historical allusions inherent in the fabulously varied inventory of industrial implements that figure in them", he viewed "the process of their being amalgamated into gripping presences" as equally important.[36] Expanding on a similar point, critic Vivien Raynor wrote in the Times that "such is [Edwards'] gift for assemblage that in his hands a spike is not merely the means by which a railroad tie is secured [...] Since he does little to change the appearance of his ingredients, one can only conclude that they are transformed because he has chosen them."[37] Writing in ARTnews, critic Gail Gregg said that despite "the aggressiveness" of the materials in many of the works, "the Fragments contain an emotional synthesis," adding that "[Edwards] has taken the rich and varied stuff of his life and welded it into sculpture that not only confronts struggle but also celebrates it."[38]
Critic Cate McQuaid, writing in The Boston Globe, said the series uses art historical tools to convey historical meaning: "While the sculptures’ industrial steel nods to Minimalism, their patina and social history flood them with associations to slavery, confinement, and the ongoing consequences of colonialism."[39] Writing in Artforum, critic Ara H. Merjian observed that the evolution of the titles – and implied subject matter – in the series marked a documentation of an array of historical wrongs: "The intermittent progression of Edwards’s gnarled steel sculptures over the past five decades—responding to civil rights abuses, to Vietnam-era injustices, or to the government-sanctioned exportation of racialized violence to detention centers abroad—figures its own postwar history."[40] Discussing the range of subject matters in the series as the works progressed, critic Saul Ostrow argued in Art in America that "Though Edwards’s work has long been seen as a product of African-American indignation and pride, today we are able to recognize his sculptures as something more varied."[41]
Critic John Yau, writing in Hyperallergic, said that the early works from the series retained their visual power long after they first premiered, and, "In fact, they have gained in resonance over time because they point to the physical pain and constraints that humans have had to endure throughout history."[42] Writing in 2015 in Sculpture magazine, critic Joan Pachner said the series "retains its urgently relevant voice", adding that, "With metaphors that extend out into a broader commentary about African and American cultural intersections and race relations, his achievement is a mature and profound synthesis."[43] Similarly, critic Ciarán Finlayson wrote in 2021 that the works "have a brilliant transversal quality" and that "their idiom, developed over the past six decades, has lost none of its disquieting contemporaneity over time."[44] Conversely, writing in frieze, critic Morgan Quaintance argued that "the powerful affects these associations once provoked are now dampened by the spectator's historical distance" from the civil rights movement and struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, although Quaintance added that "Perhaps it's unfair to demand Edwards's work stand up to the strange and insidious world of contemporary metropolitan racism".[45]
Morejón, Nancy (Winter 1994). "Melvin Edwards: The World of a Marvelous Artist". The Black Scholar. Vol. 24, no. 1, Black Cultural History. Translated by Alegría, Carmen. The Black World Foundation. pp. 47–50. JSTOR41068458. OCLC1536543.
Irbouh, Hamid (2018). "Melvin Edwards' Lynch Fragments: Negritude and the Battle for Civil Rights in America". In Pedrosa, Adriano; Moura, Rodrigo (eds.). Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments. Translated by Jojima, Tie. São Paulo Museum of Art. pp. 30–42. ISBN9788531000515. OCLC1061526860.
