How the undying spirit of Black Americans shone through their sufferings in the form of art:
an examination and curation of pieces by Dominique Nanquil
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Lynch Fragments Series, 1963
Melvin Edwards
Welded steel
[Description provided by MoMA]
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The eminent African-American sculptor Melvin Edwards has long been engaged with the history and legacy of racial violence. In his ongoing Lynch Fragments series, begun in the early 1960s, Edwards welds together bolts, chains, scissors, and spikes to create reliefs that are abstract yet recall the violence experienced by black Americans. The title of Sekuru Knows (1988) employs a term of respect for uncle, grandfather, or elder in the language of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. With its disquieting tangle of chains and scissors, the work suggests a continuum of cultural memory from the early African diaspora to the upheavals of twentieth-century America. “What I’m doing,” the artist writes, “is taking fragments of the intensity of a lynching [and] changing it into an object, and making that object something creative and positive.”
[Gallery label from MoMA's "Collection 1940s—1970s", 2019]
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Begun at the height of the civil rights movement, in 1963—the year of the March on Washington and of President Kennedy’s assassination—Edwards’s Lynch Fragment Series responds to a legacy of oppression. While the series name explicitly refers to the history of violence toward African Americans in the United States, the sculptures’ individual titles often relate them to a person or place in Namibia or Zimbabwe. The welded steel forms evoke chains, locks, handcuffs, and farming equipment. Each sculpture, roughly the size of a human head, confronts the viewer face to face.
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The MoMA, which hosts Lawrence's Great Migration series, presents one of Edwards' works alongside Panel 15 (There were lynchings). After searching through the MFAHs eMuseum, I found that two pieces of this Lynch Fragments series, Early Time and Good Word from Cayenne were on display in the Kinder Building, but I was not able to see them.
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One interesting motif to note is the use of chains. They are present in all three of these pieces, and they undoubtedly remind the viewer of the steel chains of slavery, now welded in time, in place, a memorial to that legacy of agony.
Sekuru Knows, 1988
Vertical lines visually direct the viewer downward, the triangular shape accentuating the point of the scissors and hanging chain link. The open blades of the scissors stand out as a recognizable object, drawing the viewer’s attention to it. It suggests a sharpness that refuses to die, open and ready to cut. According to the MoMA, “The title of Sekuru Knows employs a term of respect for uncle, grandfather, or elder in the language of the Shona people of Zimbabwe.”
Early Time, 1986
Straight lines intersect the central circle figure, creating a sense of imprisonment. The chainlink and padlock on the right side call to mind how African American people are bound to their past, which is intrinsically linked to the screws and nails of their industrial and railroad labor. The piece seems as though it is enclosing in on itself, locked in place by prison bars, nails, and a small lock.
Good Word from Cayenne, 1990
Large masses of steel crowd each other, the geometric shapes clashing and folding into one another to become incoherent. The chains here wrap about the form, serving as the crux of the piece, sitting precariously above the gaping maw of an empty steel jar. Contrasting the bulk of the items beneath it, this hollowness provides a visual departure from the rest of the piece, suggesting a sad void among the busy mass of steel.