Melvin Edwards learned to weld at the University of Southern California in 1960 and the world has not been quite the same since. Currently, several of his painted welded-steel sculptures from the mid-1970s and early ’80s are on view at Alexander Gray Associates, alongside a selection of works on paper, in the exhibition Painted Sculpture. While I have always found Edwards’s dense, wall-mounted conglomerations of muscular machine parts deeply evocative, these larger, lighter, freestanding works address similar issues in spite of their formal divergence. A lyrical sense of movement, both literal and metaphorical, perhaps related to Edwards’s own peripatetic migrations from Texas to Ohio to California, emerges in the exhibition, as well as his political affiliations, including the civil rights movement in the US, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism internationally, histories of Blackness in America, and abiding studies of Africa.
In a fascinating 2014 interview in BOMB magazine, Edwards spoke of his move from painting to welding:
