Melvin Edwards – Auroras

auroras is pleased to announce a solo show with new works by Melvin Edwards. Although the American artist has visited the country before, it is the first time that he produces his works in Brazil. In addition to large sculptures, the exhibition includes installations of barbed wire, Lynched Fragments and works on paper.

In his sculptures, although formally abstract, one can recognize agricultural tools – memory of his childhood in the southern United States – and currents that refer, according to the artist, to the links of connection between people. The works occupy the space dynamically, leaning on the floor or hanging on the ceiling, with the traditional alignment of the Fragments Lynch in the second room of the auroras.

Barbed wire is another symbolic material used since early 70’s, with which Melvin performs his “drawings in space”. These works create new fields within architecture, where abstraction coexists with the concreteness of the social issues that the material carries.

This project explores different strands of Melvin Edwards’ work, creating a range of reasoning developed by the artist over his nearly sixty years of research.

Melvin Edwards (Houston, Texas – 1937) is an American artist and professor working since early 1960’s, when he presented his first solo exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California. A graduate of the University of Southern California, he was the first African- American artist to have an individual show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. His research took him to Morocco, Brazil, China and Cuba from the receipt of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, specifically the Fulbright Fellowship to Zimbabwe. He taught between 1964 and 2002, teaching at Rutgers University from 1972 to 2002, and at Connecticut University. In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Solo shows include Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo, 2018), Melvin Edwards: Five Decades at the Columbus Museum of Art (2016) and the Nasher Sculpture Center (2015); Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective 1963 – 1993, an itinerant retrospective at the Nueuberger Museum of Art (1993), The Art Museum of Florida and the Hood Museum of Art (1994) ; Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, 1968). He took part in the 11th Mercosul Biennial, (Porto Alegre, 2018); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern (London, 2017); All the World’s Futures, The Venice Biennale (Venice, 2015); African-American Artists and Abstraction, National Museum of Fine Arts (Havana 2014); Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980, MoMA PS1 (New York, 2012); Valencia Biennial (Valencia, 2007); Ante America (Colombia, Venezuela, USA, Costa Rica, 1992). His work is present in important collections around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); MoMA – Museum of Modern Art (New York); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles); Afro-Brazilian Museum (São Paulo); Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco); Tate Modern (London); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), among others.