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blackkudos · 7 years ago

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Mel Edwards

Mel Edwards (born May 4, 1937) is an American sculptor, based in New York City. He has had more than a dozen one-person show exhibits and been in over four dozen group shows. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey. His works, characterised by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms, often have a political content.

Life

Melvin Eugene Edwards, Jr., was born in Houston, Texas, the eldest of his parents' four children. Edwards is a graduate of the University of Southern California and also studied at Los Angeles City College, and the Los Angeles County Art Institute.

In 1964, he began teaching at San Bernardino Valley College. He went on to teach at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), the Orange County Community College in New York, and the University of Connecticut. His first one-person exhibition was held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, in 1965. In 1972 he began teaching at Rutgers University, where he taught classes in sculpture, drawing and Third World artists until his retirement from the school in 2002. In 1975 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1976, Edwards married the poet Jayne Cortez.

Edwards' research into Third World visual culture has taken him to Morocco, Brazil, China, Cuba, and Nigeria. Inspiration for Edwards comes from his ancestral home, Africa, where he currently spends several months each year working as a sculptor in Senegal. He is a resident of New York City, and is represented by Alexander Gray Associates, a contemporary art gallery located in New York City.

Work

Edwards is best known for his "Lynch Fragments". Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, these small-scale welded metal wall reliefs were developed in three periods: 1963 to 1967, 1973 to 1974, and 1978 to the present. There are now more than 200 pieces in the series. Edwards believes the series is metaphorical of the struggles experienced by African Americans. A variety of metal objects including hammer heads, scissors, locks, chains and railroad splices, are employed as the raw materials for these works. The sculptures, usually no more than a foot tall, are hung on the wall at eye level. One critic noted "their brutish power conjures the instruments used to subjugate African Americans during centuries of slavery and oppression." Edwards is also known for his large public sculpture, smaller freestanding works, the kinetic "Rockers" series, and works executed in the medium of printmaking. His large-scale works include "Mt. Vernon", "Homage to Billie Holiday and the Young Ones at Soweto" (1977, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD) and "Breaking of the Chains" (1995, San Diego, CA).

Edwards has exhibited widely in the US as well as in Africa and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions in 2014 included at the Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris, France, and at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, UK. Several of his works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His work is also represented in the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, and the Mott-Warsh Collection in Flint, MI, among other places.

In 2012, his work appeared at MOMA PS-1.

A 30-year retrospective of his sculpture was held in 1993 at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York.

A 50-year retrospective of his work, entitled Melvin Edwards: Five Decades, opened at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, on January 31, 2015, on view until May 10, 2015. The exhibition also toured to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.

Edwards' works were featured in Art Basel Miami Beach 2015.

Awards and honors

Edwards' awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Zimbabwe, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994.

Edwards received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design on May 23, 2014.

He is the subject of a documentary film by Lydie Diakhaté, entitled Some Bright Morning: The Art Of Melvin Edwards, released in 2016.

Wikipedia

#Mel Edwards #05-04

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Hyperallergic: Women of Color Find Their Rightful Place in the History of American Abstraction

Mildred Thompson, “Magnetic Fields” (1991) oil on canvas, triptych 70.5 x 150 inches (art and photo courtesy and copyright of the Mildred Thompson Estate, Atlanta, GA)

KANSAS CITY — Art history rarely gets it right the first time, but the established accounts of American abstraction that canonized particular artists before the paint on their work was dry, is proving particularly vulnerable to criticism. Whether due to a rejection of the staggering certitude of Greenberg’s formalism, the deep veins of racism/classism/sexism running through twentieth- century criticism and curation, or the closely guarded access to institutions of art, these historical narratives are undergoing an intensive curatorial corrective.

An important achievement towards this end is Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, organized by the Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City. The exhibition, generously funded by the NEA and the Andy Warhol Foundation, is on view through September 17, after which it travels to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. According to the Kemper, this is the first museum exhibit in the US to show abstract artwork created exclusively by women of color. Stylistically varied and teeming with formal flights of bravura, the exhibit seems to engage the magnetic forces of the Mildred Thompson painting from which it takes its name.

Alma Woodsey Thomas, “Orion” (1973) acrylic on canvas, 60 x 54 inches (courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. © Alma Woodsey Thomas, photo by Lee Stalsworth)

Magnetic Fields follows closely on the success of the 2016 Women of Abstract Expressionism, at the Denver Museum of Art, which I viewed. That show was, in itself, a convincing challenge to the popular conception of Abstract Expressionism as a boy’s club. The well known 1950 Life magazine photograph of the Irascible 18, aka the New York School included only one woman, Hedda Sterne, who later would note that all the men were furious about her inclusion, thinking her mere presence would detract from the profound seriousness of their endeavor.

Installation view of Magnetic Fields Maren Hassinger, “Wrenching News,” (2008) (work on floor); Abigail DeVille, “Harlem Flag,” (2014) partial view of “Magnetic Fields” (1991) by Mildred Thompson (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

The Denver show, which traveled to Charlotte, NC and Palm Springs, CA, featured mostly exemplary work by 12 women within the circle of the Abstract Expressionists. Of course, as in any broadly conceived group show, many were left out. Someday, for instance, I’d like to see Janet Sobel’s 1944 drip paintings — admired by Pollock and which Greenberg would later cite as the first instance of ”all-over” painting — placed within an Abstract Expressionist context. But it was an eye-opener to see the bold yet underappreciated works of Judith Godwin, Perle Fine, and other even less known women from the period.

Magnetic Fields opens my eyes even further, pointing out work by Alma Thomas, Mildred Thompson, and Howardena Pindell that could expand the Abstract Expressionist canon even further. To be clear, Magnetic Fields focuses on work from the 1960s to the present, but all three of these women were working in New York in the forties and fifties, in the abstract expressionist style, right alongside their better known colleagues. Like those in the Denver Museum exhibition, these artists struggled against derision from their male peers, lack of access to the art institutions, holding down multiple jobs with paltry wages, and the demands of raising a family.

Installation view of Magnetic Fields (left to right) Alma Thomas, “Orion,” (1973); Brenna Youngblood, “YARDGUARD” (2015); Mildred Thompson, “Magnetic Fields,” (1991) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

But add a history of racism — both insidious and blatantly overt — and the achievements of the 21 African American women in Magnetic Fields add some serious grit to the much mythologized heroics of Life’s portrait of the 17 men topped off by the rather lonely figure of Hedda Sterne. The courage, tenacity, and fortitude of these women are described in their stories and those qualities reverberate in the artworks on display. In a panel discussion at the Kemper, Lilian Thomas Burwell described her lyrical, shaped paintings in the context of her own family’s struggle during the Northern migration. In a 2006 artist statement, Pindell wrote of the small circular shapes comprising her mixed media abstractions, making a connection to childhood memories of strange red circles drawn on the bottom of root beer mugs “to designate that the glass was to be used by a person of color.” These small, confetti-like shapes comprise much of her work from the late seventies and early eighties. Here, in “Autobiography: Japan (Shisen-do, Kyoto)” (1982) they are combined with scraps of tickets, exhibition guides and other ephemera into a crusty, dimpled, and obsessively constructed self image.

It wasn’t until 1975 when Alma Thomas, who worked out of her kitchen for most of her career, became the very first black woman to have a solo show at the Whitney. She was 80 years old. The perseverance behind such stories continue to inspire the careers of the younger artists in Magnetic Fields. As the title of Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s monumental 1991 abstraction reads, “Racism is Like Rain, Either It’s Raining or It’s Gathering Somewhere.”

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, “Racism is Like Rain, Either It’s Raining or It’s Gathering Somewhere” (1993) acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 86 x 138 inches (photo courtesy of the Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint MI. © Mary Lovelace O’Neal)

Importantly though, resistance to the work on display here was not limited to the white community. The Black Arts Movement, formally established in 1965 by a group of politically motivated poets, artists, and musicians, had little use for abstract painting. Deeply connected to the Black Power Movement, BAM was committed to the artistic celebration and manifestation of “the goodness and beauty of Blackness.” Scholar and co-founder of the group, Larry O’Neal, wrote: “The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world.” Abstraction, in the view of O’Neal and others in the arts movements, was a white idea. In EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, author Kellie Jones quotes Howardina Pindell’s description of an event in the late sixties: “I remember going with my abstract work to the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the director at the time said to me, ‘Go downtown and show with the white boys.’” Pindell added that William T. Williams and Al Loving met with the same kind of response. “We were basically considered traitors because we didn’t do specifically didactic work.”

Shinique Smith, “Whirlwind Dancer” (2014–2017) ink, acrylic, paper and fabric collage on canvas over wood panel 96 x 96 x 3 inches, collection of Leslie and Greg Ferrero, courtesy of David Castillo Gallery, Miami, (photo by E. G. Schempf; © Shinique Smith)

Fifty years later it is notable that, didactics or no, the work of these women can be said to express most vibrantly, “the goodness and beauty of Blackness,” as well as its enrichment of the larger visual culture.

Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, continues at the Kemper Museum of Art (4420 Warwick Boulevard) Kansas City, MO through September 17.

The post Women of Color Find Their Rightful Place in the History of American Abstraction appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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