PARIS.- As part of the carte blanche exhibition program curated by Naomi Beckwith, Palais de Tokyo presents a major exhibition of Melvin Edwards, American sculptor who is a key figure in a counter- history of American art.

Melvin Edwards is best known for his large-scale abstract sculptures, his site-specific barbed-wire installations, the incorporation and depiction of chains, and his Lynch Fragments series, assemblages of welded industrial objects and materials mounted on the wall, a body of work he has been developing since 1963. Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, which marked the beginnings of his artistic research, his work questions a post-slavery, American socio-economic history of memory through the use of these materials and their semantics.

His sculptures are often intimate tributes and monuments, serving as portals that connect the past and present of Black Atlantic geographies. Both material and subtle, radical and complex, they play with concepts and materials and reflect his curiosity about language, architecture, and the production of knowledge.

They embody a practice that plays with the polysemy of concepts and materials, drawing on and experimenting with linguistics, architecture, kinetics and an anthropological reflection on ironwork that repositions Africa as the universal birthplace of its development. Deeply infused with poetry and jazz music, Melvin Edwards’ work reflects his relationships with poets such as Léon-Gontran Damas, whom he met in 1969 in New York; Edouard Glissant, whom he met in Paris in the early 1980s; and Jayne Cortez, with whom he collaborated for many years on the illustrations for his collections. The collaborative dimension of Melvin Edwards’ printed works is also highlighted in the exhibition, notably through the story of his involvement in founding a printmaking studio in Dakar in the late 1990s.

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Fridericianum in Kassel (Germany) and the Kunsthalle Bern (Switzerland). It spans sixty years of the artist’s work, shaped by numerous travels, friendships, commitments, and collaborations—primarily between the United States, the Caribbean, and West Africa. The exhibition also revisits the history of his 1984 show at UNESCO in Paris as a moment of convergence for these solidaristic Pan-African cultural networks, marked by the circulation of artists and ideas committed to the decolonization of knowledge.

Artistic director : Naomi Beckwith

Curators : Amandine Nana and François Piron, assisted by Vincent Neveux

Born in 1937 in Houston, Texas (USA), Melvin Edwards currently lives and works between New York and Baltimore (USA), as well as Dakar (Senegal).

Melvin Edwards is a pioneering figure in the history of African American abstract art. He began his sculptural explorations in the early 1960s in Los Angeles and New York, within the context of the Civil Rights Movement and the cultural dynamism of the Black Arts Movement, where art, literature, and jazz intersected.

During this period, he exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, collaborated with public art collectives, and became the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. In the 1970s, he undertook his first travels to Africa and the Caribbean, and later to Paris in the 1980s. He is best known for his use of metal in his sculptural work: hard metal welded together, as seen in his ongoing Lynch Fragments series (since 1963), as well as chains and barbed wire. His minimalist and abstract approach serves as a vessel for social histories and personal narratives, often addressing themes of violence and resistance from the perspective of Black experiences on both sides of the Atlantic.