Mel Edwards

Melvin "Mel" Edwards (born May 4, 1937) is an American artist, teacher, and abstract steel-metal sculptor.

Additionally he has worked in drawing and printmaking.

His artwork has political content often referencing African-American history, as well as the exploration of themes within slavery.

Visually his works are characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms in metal.

He lives between Upstate New York and in Plainfield, New Jersey.

He has had more than a dozen one-person show exhibits and been in over four dozen group shows.

Edwards has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey.

Melvin Eugene Edwards, Jr., was born on May 4, 1937, in Houston, Texas, to Thelmarie Edwards and Melvin Edwards Sr, and was the eldest of his parents' four children.

His father worked for Houston Lighting & Power and his parents divorced in early childhood.

He was raised in Dayton, Ohio, for five years, but by middle-school age the family moved back to Houston, where Edwards grew up during a time of racial segregation.

He attended E. O. Smith Junior High School and Phillis Wheatley High School.

He was a creator from a young age and was encouraged by his parents with his father building his first easel when he was 14 years old.

Edwards was introduced to abstract art by a high-school teacher.

While attending high school, Edwards started to take art classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

In 1955, he moved to southern California to pursue studies at Los Angeles City College.

Edwards transferred schools to study art and play football at the University of Southern California (USC), where he received his B.F.A. degree in 1965.

While attending USC, Edwards took a history course that was rooted in a European-centric view, which upset him and fueled him to learn more about African history.

This inspired his travel to Africa five years later.

He attended Los Angeles County Art Institute (known as Otis College of Art and Design) during breaks from USC to study sculpture with Renzo Fenci.

Additionally, Edwards was mentored by Hungarian-American painter Francis de Erdely, and studied under Hal Gebhardt, Hans Burkhardt, and Edward Ewing.

In 1965, he went on to teach at the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as the California Institute of the Arts) until 1967.

His first one-person exhibition was held in 1965 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, California.

Edwards cited jazz music as an influence on his work.

In 1965, Edwards was working in Los Angeles as a driver for a film company, on his breaks he would visit Tamarind Print Institute.

It was at Tamarind where he met many influential national artists such as George Sugarman, Richard Hunt, Leon Golub, Louise Nevelson, and Gabriel Kohn.

Later in that year, Sugarman had a New York University art exhibition, which Edwards photographed for him.

At that exhibition, Edwards met Al Held and asked him for a job and Held pointed him to a recent Yale University graduate, painter William T. Williams.

The two artists went on to have a very close partnership that continues to this day.

He moved to New York City in 1967.

Additionally he taught at Orange County Community College in New York (1967–1969), and the University of Connecticut (1970–1972).

Bowling made a work that referenced Edwards, titled Mel Edwards Decides (1968).

Smokehouse (also known as Smokehouse Associates, Smokehouse Collective, Smokehouse Painters) was a New York City-based community "wall painting" initiative created in part by Melvin Edwards and William T. Williams, spanning from 1968 until 1970.

In 1969, Edwards met the artist Frank Bowling, a painter who shares his interest in making art that is primarily abstract, a position that would become contested as members of the Black cultural and artistic community called for art to serve as a site of political empowerment.

In 1970, Edwards took his first trip to Africa, visiting the West African republics of Nigeria, Togo, Benin, and Ghana.

This trip influenced his work, and was followed by other visits to Africa over the years.

During the 1970s, he participated in a community art space called Communications Village, operated by printmaker Benjamin Leroy Wigfall in Kingston, NY.

Andrews made prints with the help of printer assistants who had been taught printmaking by Wigfall, and Edwards exhibited there.

In 1972, he began teaching art classes at Livingston College of Rutgers University (now part of the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences).

By 1980, he was a full professor and teaching at the Mason Gross School of Creative and Performing Arts at Rutgers University.

By 2002, he retired from teaching.