Leslie King-Hammond first crossed paths with Melvin Edwards when he was a visiting artist at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

The young graduate dean was fascinated by him immediately — few other artists she knew had spent time studying their craft in Africa, but Edwards had apprenticed for a sculptor in Nigeria. His abstract steel sculptures were unusual and engaging, and the man behind them was unpretentious and passionate about his work.

He’d already begun to make a name for himself in the art world with “Lynch Fragments,” a series he started in 1963. The tiny sculptures, made of recycled steel and fashioned into chains, barbed wire and other objects, were inspired by Black history, the African American experience and racial violence he studied at home and abroad.

Edwards was “a phenomenal force in the world of sculpture” who broke barriers at a time when many Black artists were not recognized for their talents, King-Hammond said. In 1970, he was the first Black sculptor to debut a solo exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Colleagues praised the layered messaging of his work and the fresh perspective he brought to contemporary American art.

Throughout his career, Edwards displayed his work in hundreds of cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, London — and Baltimore. He frequented MICA through the 1980s and ‘90s and had exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art and Morgan State University.

For the last few years of his life, he called Charm City home. Edwards, known for his positive attitude and generosity, died March 30 at age 88.

“He was an individual of unparalleled excellence, brilliance, and philosophically rounded in how you can approach the business of making something out of metal, wood, mixed media materials, to make it have impact,” King-Hammond said.

Edwards was born May 4, 1937, in Houston, and moved to Los Angeles in 1955. He studied painting at the University of Southern California — where he’d enrolled on a football scholarship — until he saw a graduate student with a welding torch, according to a biography from Alexander Gray Associates, the gallery that represented him.

“Steel, with its implied force and physical memory, became his lifelong medium,” the biography states.

Edwards was interested in objects with multiple meanings and incorporated many of them in his body of work. Chains could invoke images of slavery and restraint but could also be associated with labor and interpersonal connections. Barbed wire could represent oppression and violence as well as agriculture and safety.

He utilized everyday tools, like hammers and horseshoes, in his sculptures. Most of his work, especially the pieces included in the “Lynch Fragments” series, was not literal. Few were made to depict or mimic actual objects or people.

He moved to New York City in 1967, exhibited at the Whitney three years later, and soon after started traveling. His first trip to Africa in 1970 “opened eyes and doors for me,” he said in an interview for the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2019.

“I quickly became aware that art is like language,” he said. “People invent languages all over the world for their own reasons, and they invent enough to culturally express themselves, to scientifically express themselves, just all kinds of ways.”

He talked of the “ancestral relationship” he felt with ironworkers in West Africa, said Lowery Stokes Sims, a Baltimore-based art historian and curator. He told stories of his travels often.

His work “really opened up my mind in terms of the ways that forms could be pulled out of their usual context and sort of reassembled in a very evocative way that’s abstract, that didn’t really hammer home a message but allowed you to bring your own experience to those forms,” Stokes Sims said.

At the same time, Edwards shared many Black creators’ concerns that they were devalued and pigeonholed into making only a certain kind of art.

In 1971, Edwards pulled out of a show the Whitney Museum hosted for contemporary Black artists. He signed on to a letter saying the exhibit was a “waste of time, energy and life” that “negates a coherent viewing and analysis of the creative content, context, influence, and general value of the works of African American artists.”

Edwards was a “staple” at MICA throughout the 1980s, King-Hammond said. He connected with students and shared his knowledge and experience freely, she said.

“With Mel, he was that caliber of individual who could mentor, who could provide wisdom, who could provide guidance, who could provide infrastructure for them in order to work their way through the particular problems they were having,” she said.

He could adapt his mentorship for the moment, whether it was talking a student through a technical question or leading a discussion on sculpture from an African perspective.

His work has been available for viewing across Baltimore over the past several decades. In 2024, his sculptures were featured in a group exhibit at Morgan State University’s James E. Lewis Museum of Art.

In 2019, he was part of the “Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art” exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and also had his own exhibit for “Melvin Edwards: Crossroads,” a collection representing the cross-cultural connections he made throughout his career.

He moved to Baltimore in 2017 to be with his wife, Diala Touré, who survives him. Before that, he split most of his time between the New York region and Senegal. He and King-Hammond, now in the same city, spent evenings listening to jazz at Keystone Korner.

“Mel should be remembered for the magnificence of his work and the magnificence of his humanity and the brilliance of the messaging of all the work that he gave to contemporary American art,” King-Hammond said.

“He was a man of superior achievement who did not waver or hesitate, ever, to assist any individual who had any need to know, understand or want to be part of the history, the understanding, the engagement of how sculpture plays a pivotal role in our lives.”

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