The Six Best-Designed Items of Summer

This summer in New York’s City Hall Park, the Public Art Fund presents six pieces by Melvin Edwards, 83, who has spent his career exploring the African- American experience in all its complexity. The show, called Brighter Days, includes Homage to Coco, a 1970 rounded steel work connected by chains that evokes, among other things, his grandmother’s rocking chair. “Chains carry multiple metaphors—chains of love, of continuity and the history of slavery,” says Edwards, whose work is intensely physical, and heavy in all senses of the word. “Steel is the first girl I danced with,” he says of his favorite material. “That’s the medium that allows me to express myself.” —Ted Loos

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Read full list at wsj.com.