Melvin Edwards Decides

In 1970 Melvin Edwards crisscrossed a gallery in the Whitney Museum of American Art with barbed wire. His work was in reaction to developments in American art, especially Minimalism, but in material that evoked violent racism, raising significant and still potent questions about how abstract art can meaningfully address the politics of race. Recently, Edwards’s long-neglected work has been featured in several major books and high-profile exhibitions. This scholarship, however, has mostly focused on his response to debates on Black Art in the civil rights era, separating his work from the dominant approaches to modern sculpture that Edwards both referenced and reconfigured. Rather than protest the museum from without, he criticized it from within, addressing the art world’s exclusion of African American artists by installing barbed wire and directing the Minimalist emphasis on literal space toward the more specific problem of Black art in the white cube.