Artist: Edwards, Melvin

Trained as a painter in the 1950s, Edwards soon took up metal sculpture, which artists were then approaching through energetic experimentation. Sculpture was also a means that offered him the opportunity to reference the history of slavery in realistic terms. Edwards further infused it with loaded metaphorical echoes to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In 1970, he became the first African American sculptor whose work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.