Begun at the height of the civil rights movement, in 1963—the year of the March on Washington and of President Kennedy’s assassination—Edwards’s Lynch Fragment Series responds to a legacy of oppression. While the series name explicitly refers to the history of violence toward African Americans in the United States, the sculptures’ individual titles often relate them to a person or place in Namibia or Zimbabwe. The welded steel forms evoke chains, locks, handcuffs, and farming equipment. Each sculpture, roughly the size of a human head, confronts the viewer face to face.
Gallery label from "Collection 1940s—1970s", 2019
