In October 2025, the Palais de Tokyo presents a retrospective of the American sculptor Melvin Edwards, an important figure in a contemporary history of American art. This exhibition resonates with “ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art and Francophone Thought”, a major project curated by the season’s guest artistic director, Naomi Beckwith.

Born in Houston in 1937, Melvin Edwards now lives and works between Baltimore and New York in the United States and Dakar in Senegal. The retrospective exhibition spans sixty years of the artist’s practice, shaped by his many travels, friendships, commitments and collaborations, mainly between the United States, the Caribbean and West Africa. It also revisits the history of his 1984 exhibition in Paris at UNESCO as a moment of confluence for these pan-African cultural networks, united in the circulation of artists and ideas committed to the decolonisation of Eurocentric humanist knowledge.

Melvin Edwards is best known for his large-scale abstract sculptures, his site-specific barbed-wire installations, the incorporation and depiction of chains, and the Lynch Fragments – a series made up of wall-mounted assemblages of welded industrial objects and materials that he has been developing since 1963.

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, which marked the beginnings of his artistic research, Edwards uses these semantically charged materials to explore the memorial and socio-economic histories of post-slavery America. His sculptures are often intimate tributes and monuments, serving as portals that connect the past and present of Black Atlantic geographies. They embody a practice that plays with the polysemy of concepts and materials, drawing on and experimenting with linguistics, architecture, kinetics and an anthropological reflection on ironwork that repositions Africa as the universal birthplace of its development. Deeply infused with poetry and jazz music, 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 Edwards’ printed works is also highlighted in the exhibition, notably through the story of his involvement in founding a printmaking studio in Dakar in the late 1990s.

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