Born in 1937 in Houston, Texas (USA), Melvin Edwards currently lives and works between New York and Baltimore (USA), as well as Dakar (Senegal).

Melvin Edwards is a pioneering figure in the history of African American abstract art. He began his sculptural explorations in the early 1960s in Los Angeles and New York, within the context of the Civil Rights Movement and the cultural dynamism of the Black Arts Movement, where art, literature, and jazz intersected. During this period, he exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, collaborated with public art collectives, and became the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. In the 1970s, he undertook his first travels to Africa and the Caribbean, and later to Paris in the 1980s. He is best known for his use of metal in his sculptural work: hard metal welded together, as seen in his ongoing Lynch Fragments series (since 1963), as well as chains and barbed wire. His minimalist and abstract approach serves as a vessel for social histories and personal narratives, often addressing themes of violence and resistance from the perspective of Black experiences on both sides of the Atlantic.