An Evening with Artist Melvin Edwards

“With my sculpture, I’ve evolved independently. I understood that abstraction meant to take form and develop something else, or just start from nowhere—but also that these are all your developments and you keep it personal. My work doesn’t look like it came from another source; I make my own music.” —Melvin Edwards, Artforum

Join Carnegie Museum of Art for an evening with this influential artist, who presents a body of work in 20/20: The Studio Museum in Harlem and Carnegie Museum of Art.

For five decades, Melvin Edwards has used his distinctive sculptural language to probe histories of race, labor, protest, national identity, and violence in America. His primary material since the 1960s has been welded steel. Edwards is known for his Lynch Fragments, compact assemblages that take the form of heads or masks. He constructs these works from scrap metal and found items like bolts, blades, gears, clamps, locks, and chains.