...Rebecca Wolff [email protected] Copyright © 2022 by Nka Publications 2022 Assembling 106 Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 50 May 2022 DOI 10.1215/10757163-9729162 © 2022 by Nka Publications Pan-Africanism in Melvin Edward s Homage to the Poet Léon Gontran Damas Rebecca...

...Lydie Diakhaté This article aims to introduce Melvin Edwards’s career and explore, through his work in public art, his ongoing dialogue between his global black consciousness and conceptual art. Edwards is a pioneer and prominent artist in the history of contemporary African American art...

... Melvin Edwards is a pioneer in the history of contemporary African American art and sculpture. This interview relates his career as a black internationalist, a pan-Africanist, and a prime witness to modernist innovations in the New York scene, from the era of abstract expressionism to the current...

...Edward S. Spriggs This essay documents how Edward S. Spriggs, early director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, built the museum’s artist-in-residence program with the idea of engaging the community by providing studios to artists in need of space and by creating a printmaking workshop. The essay also...

..., as contemporaneity is influenced by history, memory, loss, absence, and displacement. The stories throughout relate to distinctions of power and class hierarchy, social injustice, mass migration, absence, and loss. In the spirit of Edward Said, topics of displacement and exile abound in works that are woven together...

... Beulah Woodard; and the photographers dominant cultural stereotypes and expectations Johan Hagemeyer, Sonia Noskowiak, Edward placed upon black women. Weston, Weegee, Carl Van Vechten, Manuel Like many artists, Maudelle clearly saw her Alvarez Bravo...

... the true value Mixed-­media assemblage became a key form of the objects around it.2 Whether one used hair for enacting this transformation. Beyond South (David Hammons), riot debris (Noah Purifoy and LA, assemblage, junk art, and other nontraditional Judson Powell), or rags and steel (Greg Edwards...

... Jokin; 1987-88. Courtesy of the artist. Fall 2006 Nka • 137 Melvin Edwards, Because of Struggle, 1994 welded steel, 13x11 x 7 inches...

... fit- ting visual language for the job. His language and approach to visual communication employed the many vernaculars he used verbally and visually. African American abstract artist Melvin Edwards (b. 1937), like Euell, was influenced by the complex way Lewis spoke. In an interview, the sculptor dis...

... In Edward’s earliest work, he was was he work, earliest Edward’s...

... such as Edward Spriggs.3 Rumors about the de- struction of one of Lloyd’s light boxes inflected an ensuing aesthetic debate about which style—figuration or ab- straction—contained more value for black liberation. Cahan views Spriggs’s Left to right, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Carter Burden, Charles Innis...

... voice to the often silenced history of Blackness in the United States. Alongside sculptural installations by Kevin Beasley (Strange Fruit [Pair 1], 2015) and Diamond Stingily (Entryways, 2016 and 2019) on the third floor, Melvin Edwards s wall-based works from his ongoing series Lynch Fragments hang...

... by Roy DeCarava, the group s first director. Women had a strong presence other wise, starting near the entrance with art-matriarch Elizabeth Catlett s Elizabeth Catlett, Black Unity, 1968. Cedar, 21 x 12 1 2 x 23 in. Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo: Edward C...

... Stothard’s lost painting The Voyage 14. Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Post-­ of the Sable Venus, which illustrated the anonymous 1781 poem structuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the “The Sable Venus: An Ode,” in Bryan Edwards’s 1801 History, ‘Hottentot Venus...

.... 70s at the height of minimalism, were part of the evolving "Tombstones Blues" (from "The Dylan Series") discourse of that movement. His works resonate with the employs the music of Bob Dylan, the art of Edward painterliness of Donald Judd's minimalist constructions...

... frame- fourteen African American women organized a work. The works of David Hammons, Melvin landmark exhibition at the Acts of Art Gallery in Edwards, Elizabeth Catlett, Dana Chandler, and Greenwich Village, “Where We At” Black Women others exemplify the richness and diversity of the Artists...

... the Christian Bourgois, 1972), p. 207. See Edwards and also Jennifer Wilks, Race, Gender, and assertion of cultural or racial authenticity as a 14 Comparative...

..., black photographers at work in those days, and Cowans—like fellow abstract painters Frank rarer still, black photographers deviating from the Bowling and Sam Gilliam, and abstract sculptors then current and popular repudiation of "art for Barbara Chase-Riboud and Mel Edwards, whose art's sake...

... with Edna M. Togba In 1973 Edward S. Spriggs, the former director of the Stu- Neal, and many others. The Ebony Museum of Negro History dio Museum of Harlem, wrote, “AFRICOBRA—African Com- and Arts, founded by Margaret and Charles Burroughs, was mune of Bad Relevant Artists—from their perspective...