Pamberi

Carefully assembled and held for over three decades in a single, private collection, To Sing Again, Pamberi, and Black Label are masterful demonstrations of Edwards’ visceral and distinct artistic voice — dynamic, piercing works that knit together political and cultural histories with aesthetic force. Each work belongs to Edwards’ series Lynch Fragments, the title of which unflinchingly relates his work to the shared and personal history of violence and oppression faced by Black Americans, refusing the constraints of formalism and insisting on its sociopolitical context. Over the course of his career, Edwards made over 300 Lynch Fragments; in these works, he incorporates chains, hooks, spikes, screws, and padlocks among myriad other metal forms, evoking industrialization, machinery, farming, and bondage. These components, Edwards always insisted, were never literal — he instead described his work as moving in “the direction of poetry,” where ambiguities between materiality, purpose, and function nurture associative interpretations: “It’s like creating music. The same sound one time it’s a beautiful high point of an aria, another time it's just a screaming son of a bitch down the street … So, in visual art we have the same kind of thing. You’re making sculpture with chain or with barbed wire that will remind my human compatriots in the world that we got lots of work to do” (M. Edwards, quoted in Radical Acts, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986). It is precisely this quality of Edwards’ work — the ability to meld the individual associations and feelings of every viewer while retaining its specific political substrate — that makes his work so compelling. The result of Edwards’ “music” is a staggering body of work that wholly fulfills his desire to create abstract art with specific resonance for Black audiences without relying on figuration, proof that abstraction can meaningfully engage with the politics of race. In the decades since their creation, these works remain emotionally, art historically, and politically potent — constant reminders of art’s power to give new formal means of expressing, linking, and experiencing shared histories.