Melvin Edwards’s interest in art was encouraged by his family and reinforced by visits to the art museum in Dayton, Ohio, where he spent his childhood. When his family moved to Houston, Texas, in 1949, he became passionate about jazz. Its riffs and improvisational character inspired his interest in abstraction, as it has many avant-garde artists in the Americas and Europe. After high school, Edwards moved to Los Angeles and studied painting and art history at City College, the University of Southern California, and the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design). Initially a painter who worked in an Abstract Expressionist mode, Edwards, in the 1960s, began exploring three-dimensional forms, especially welded steel.

Afro Phoenix No. 1 is an early piece from Lynch Fragments, a series of approximately two hundred sculptures that Edwards began in 1963 and has continued to work on at various stages of his career. Each piece is a metaphor for the struggles of the early Civil Rights movement, particularly for violent assaults against blacks. The critic Michael Brenson has described the series in terms of its compositional dynamism and has explained how the various metal objects the works comprise often offer a number of contrasting meanings: chains suggest the horrors of slavery and the supportiveness of bonding; scissors connote severing and the cutting necessary to piece things together; nails evoke crucifixion and construction. 21 In this sculpture, Edwards associated black people with the phoenix, the legendary bird that lived for several hundred years, was consumed by fire on a funeral pyre, and rose from the ashes to endure for several more generations. The shape of the horseshoe located in the center of the work further associates it with the theme of wings, ascension, and flight. Like many examples in this series, Afro Phoenix No. 1 is a testament to Edwards’s fascination with demonstrating the flexibility, strength, and beauty of steel and his interest in combining disparate materials and in manipulating space. In title, medium, and form, the entire series exemplifies Edwards’s ability to fuse modernist abstraction with personal and collective history. (ADB)