Melvin Edwards’ work reflects his engagement with the history of race, labor, and violence, specifically as reflected in experiences of the African diaspora. With welding his preferred medium, Edwards’s compositions are studies in abstraction and minimalism; he repurposes found metal objects such as tools, knives, hooks, chains, and railroad spikes. The resulting works comprise Edward’s best known body of work, his Lynch Fragment series. Begun in 1963, at the beginning of the civil rights movement—the year of the March on Washington and of President Kennedy’s assassination—the Lynch Fragments also reflected the artist’s own experiences with the Los Angeles Police Department.

The Lynch Fragments helped to establish Edwards as a sculptor and to lay out the formal language he would continue in his practice. Edwards returned to the series through his activism related to the Vietnam War, and as a result of his connections to Africa and the African diaspora following the first of many sustained visits to Africa in the 1970s. The wall-bound welded steel forms evoke chains, locks, handcuffs, and farming equipment. The weld marks and the roughness of the metal surfaces, subjected to protruding blunt and sometimes sharp forms, convey an unequivocal sense of violence and danger. Edwards prescribes the hanging height of the Lynch Fragments to align with the artist’s eye level; roughly the size of a human head, sculptures such as Go confront the viewer face to face. Reflecting on the dynamics of hanging and suspension associated with both lynching and how large steel sculptures are formed, the Lynch Fragment series would lead to larger-scale works and a number of public commissions.

Go features nails, chains, and padlocks, and suggests competing narratives around labor, artistic creation, subjugation, and violence. Titles for Edwards carry meaning: Go communicates a personal sense of urgency: for him things must “go” psychologically, physically, and aesthetically as his work evolves.