As part of the carte blanche invitation extended to Naomi Beckwith, the Palais de Tokyo is presenting a major retrospective dedicated to sculptor Melvin Edwards—an influential figure in the history of contemporary American art.

Melvin Edwards is best known for his large-scale abstract sculptures, his site-specific barbed-wire installations, the incorporation and his depiction of chains, and his Lynch Fragments, a series of wall-mounted assemblages of welded industrial objects and materials he began in 1963. As his practice developed during the Civil Rights Movement, Edwards’ use of these materials questions an American cultural memory and socioeconomic history.

His sculptures are often tributes and intimate monuments, portals linking the past and present of the Black Atlantic. Both physical and subtle, radical and intricate, they engage in an interplay of concepts and materials, drawing on linguistics, architecture and an anthropological reflection on ironwork that revalorizes Africa as the universal home of industrial development.

Deeply infused with poetry and jazz music, Melvin Edwards’ work reflects his relationships with poets such as Léon-Gontran Damas, whom he met in 1969 in New York; Edouard Glissant, whom he met in Paris in the early 1980s; and Jayne Cortez, with whom he collaborated for many years on the illustrations for her books. The collaborative dimension of Melvin Edwards’ printed works is highlighted in the exhibition, as is the story of his involvement in the creation of a printmaking workshop in Dakar in the late 1990s.

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Fridericianum museum in Kassel (Germany) and the Kunsthalle Bern (Switzerland).