Lynch Fragments is the title of a series of abstract metal sculptures created by American artist Melvin Edwards. The artist began the series in 1963 and has continued it over the course of his entire career, aside from two periods in the 1960s and 1970s. The sculptures in the series are small, usually wall-based assemblages of metal scraps and objects such as spikes, chains, and scissors, welded together in various combinations.
The title of the series alludes to the practice of lynching in the United States. Edwards, an African-American artist who grew up in both an integrated community in Ohio and a segregated community in Texas, has described the works as metaphors for both the violence inflicted on black people in the U.S., and the power and struggles of African Americans fighting against that violence. Additionally, many of the works also explicitly reference African and African-American history, contemporary political events, and notable figures from Edwards's life and studies in their titles.
Critics and art historians have interpreted the works in the series in a variety of ways, with some highlighting the possible sociocultural and historical allusions in the underlying materials and titles, and others arguing that the works are examples of formalist abstraction whose meanings are primarily visual rather than political. The pieces in the series, numbering around 300 sculptures, are among Edwards's best-known and most widely lauded works.
Background and history
Melvin Edwards, an African-American sculptor making abstract art, had been experimenting with welding small metal scraps together for several years in the early 1960s, while living in Los Angeles.[2] In 1963, this experimentation resulted in a small relief sculpture that began his Lynch Fragments series.[2][3] The first work in the series, titled Some Bright Morning, comprises a shallow cylindrical form accented by bits of steel, a blade-shaped triangle of metal, and a short chain hanging from the piece with a small lump of steel at its end.[2]
Edwards began the series during an increase in activity in the civil rights movement and in the midst of tensions in Los Angeles due to instances of police violence against black communities and related events.[2][3] He was moved to start the series partly in response to these developments, in particular the 1962 killing of Ronald Stokes,[4][2][5] an unarmed black man killed by police in Watts while attempting to deescalate a raid on the Nation of Islam mosque where he served as the secretary.[6] Edwards saw a photograph of Stokes' body with scarring and stitches after an autopsy and said the image "sticks in my head."[7] He had also recently read several news reports and stories about various contemporary and historical lynchings and instances of attempted violence across the country, including Ralph Ginzburg's anthology 100 Years of Lynchings, a compilation of reports published in 1962.[2][8] The first sculpture in the series, Some Bright Morning, is titled in reference to an account in Ginzburg's anthology.[9] Writing in 1982, Edwards described the narrative of the referenced story:
"Some Bright Morning is a piece dedicated to a black family in Florida who had been warned by white people not to be so militant. The family continued to be militant until the white people said that some bright morning they were coming to get them, and when they came, the black people were armed and ready. They fought and then took to the swamp in guerilla warfare against those whites and they didn't lose."
—Melvin Edwards, "Lynch Fragments", in Buhle, Paul, et al. (eds.). Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination (1982).[10]
Edwards has referenced the Florida story from Ginzburg's anthology several times as the source of the quote "some bright morning", but the phrase actually originated in a different story from Ginzburg's book. The original source of the quote is the story of a farmer in Georgia who was lynched in 1919 after attempting to engage in labor organizing in his community.[11]
Having grown up in urban communities in Dayton, Ohio, and Houston, somewhat protected from more violent civilian racism in rural areas, Edwards did not witness or have experiences directly connected with lynching in his early life.[2] Describing the meaning of the series' title in 1993 as it relates to his own experiences, Edwards said:
"Basically, lynching didn't take place in a volatile city like Houston with its large black population. [...] I didn't think about lynching per se. Now what I thought about was police brutality. But you knew that when you got to rural places that kind of danger was possible. The title of the series is, in a sense, a metaphor for the whole struggle and the point that I took it had a lot to do with the fact that the level of struggle necessary to make things just had to be up to the level that it was unjust. My effort in sculpture had to be as intense as injustice, in the reverse."
—Melvin Edwards, quoted in Brenson, Michael, "Lynch Fragments", in Gedeon, Lucinda H. (ed.). Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, 1963–1993 (1993).[12]
While few of the works reference specific instances of lynching, Edwards chose to use the title in order to bring "that scale of intensity and that kind of power" to each work in the series.[13] He also said that he used the title to guide viewers' interpretations of his sculpture: "I just didn't want them stuck in formalist criticism [...] I figured that, if I called them Lynch Fragments, people couldn't say, 'Well, the form does this and the form does that,' and just dismiss it."[14]
Edwards identified several other artists as inspirations for the series, including the welded sculpture of David Smith,[15][16] the sculpture and painting of Julio González,[17] and the work of Theodore Roszak.[18][16] Beyond the styles and techniques of these artists, Edwards was inspired by the ways they communicated their social and political beliefs through their work, including in Smith's antifascist sculpture series Medals for Dishonor and González' sculpture La Montserrat depicting a peasant family.[19] Edwards was inspired by these artists and series but he wanted to move beyond the figuration used in those references, seeking ways to utilize abstract imagery and welding to communicate his beliefs.[20]
After moving from Los Angeles to New York in January 1967, Edwards stopped making new Lynch Fragments sculptures.[21][22] As he said, "I felt I had gotten good esthetic mileage out of them that I wasn't getting as much out of the larger-scale pieces," so he turned his focus to his other bodies of work.[21] He has also said that the move from California offered him an opportunity to develop beyond his old work: "That first convenience of the move from California to New York, was, well, you could close the door on the period, just by moving three thousand miles."[22]
Edwards began making sculptures for the series again in 1973, largely as a response to pro-segregation demonstrations in New York and a rise in attacks on black people in his neighborhood, SoHo.[23][24] He was also moved to return to the series by his anger over the Vietnam War and the high casualties of African Americans in the conflict.[23][25] The Lynch Fragments works from this period are slightly larger than the earlier sculptures and extend further off the wall.[21][23] Art historian Catherine Craft characterized the sculptures from 1973 as "more physically aggressive".[23] By the end of the year, Edwards had stopped making the sculptures once again as he felt that the works "were so obsessive in their making that I couldn't develop other ideas..."[21]
In 1978, Edwards mounted a retrospective exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which gave him the opportunity to view a large number of the Lynch Fragments sculptures together for the first time in several years.[21][26] This inspired him to start making new sculptures for the series: "I said, you do have plenty of ideas. After the show was over, I said, why cut it off, just find a way, shit."[21] In addition, his new position teaching art at Rutgers University afforded him more stability and the funds for a larger studio, allowing him to experiment more with the series.[27] Craft described Edwards's choice to begin work on the series again as "motivated by creative rather than political urgency", although several of the Lynch Fragments sculptures from post-1978 do reference current events in their titles, including references to the Soweto uprising and the Iraq War.[27]
After traveling to Africa for the first time in the early 1970s and continuing to visit different parts of the continent throughout the decade, Edwards began using various references to African history and politics as the titles for the works in the series, along with the names of artists and leaders he had met or been inspired by in Africa.[28][29][30] He also began using phrases from African languages as titles for Lynch Fragments sculptures like Koyo (1973), which takes its title from an Edo greeting,[31] and Sekuru Knows (1988), titled in reference to a Shona word for elder or grandfather.[32] Additional travels in Africa and throughout Latin America and Asia in the '70s, '80s, and beyond inspired a range of titles relating to additional global histories, figures, and social movements,[33][34][31] including Palmares (1988), created to honor the centennial of the abolition of slavery in Brazil.[31] Specific figures named or referenced in the title of sculptures from the series include artists, musicians, activists, politicians, and writers like Charles Alston, J. Max Bond Jr., Amílcar Cabral, critic Wilfred Cartey, Frantz Fanon, Makina Kameya, Martin Luther King Jr., Wifredo Lam, Norman Lewis, Al Loving, Samora Machel, Ana Mendieta, Senegalese blacksmith Bara Niasse, Gilberto de la Nuez, Charlie Parker, Francisco Romão, José Clemente Orozco, John Takawira, Henry Tayali, Ida B. Wells, and Richard Wright, as well as Edwards' late wife, Jayne Cortez.[a] Edwards purposely decided not to name works in the series after any then-broadly known artists or figures of European descent.[12][35]
Since restarting the series in 1978, Edwards continued to produce new Lynch Fragments sculptures throughout his career.[39][1] The series included more than 300 sculptures as of 2024.[40] The pieces in the series are among Edwards's best-known and celebrated and have been cited by several authors as his breakthrough or signature works.[b] Speaking in 1993 about the importance of the series to his overall career, Edwards said: "The Lynch Fragments have changed my life. They made this life of thirty years as a sculptor. They are the core to all the work. If anybody ever knows I lived, this is going to be why."[45]
Description
Edwards has used an array of metal objects and materials to create the sculptures, including whole or severed axes, barbed wire, bolts, car parts, chains, farm tools, gears, hammers, horseshoes, jacks, knives, nails, padlocks, rakes, scissors, shovels, spikes, and wrenches.[46][47][3] He said he sometimes spends months, weeks, or years slowly adding elements to a work before considering it finished, a process he described as "organic", saying "It was like they grew rather than they were made".[28]
The sculptures are usually wall-based, although some works in the series are displayed on pedestals.[3] Most of the works are small, generally around the size of a human head,[48][47] and are usually installed around eye-level six feet high, what he called a "natural height".[48] Edwards described his ideal installation for exhibiting the sculptures, saying the works needed to be spaced three feet apart, preferably installed in groups of multiples of 16, and ideally exhibited in a circular space "because the feeling of the pieces [...] will be more spatial."[48] He developed this installation structure after his first solo museum exhibition in 1965 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; his Lynch Fragments sculptures in that exhibition were installed fairly haphazardly by museum staff without his input, leading him to think more deeply about a preferred installation technique.[49]
Reception and analysis
A range of critics, curators, and art historians have written in different terms about their experiences with and understanding of the series. In 2024, art critic Michael Brenson argued that Edwards "wants viewers to respond to them vividly, in ways that reveal their multiplicity, and we do."[40] Critic Michael Kimmelman, writing in The New York Times, said the sculptures had an "intense and concentrated energy",[50] and Nancy Princenthal, writing in Art in America, said that "these sculptures seem ready to detonate on contact".[51] Similarly, critic Jonathan Goodman, writing in artcritical, said the sculptures were "eloquent but also brutalized shards of content [that] feel as though they are ready to explode."[52] Critic William Zimmer wrote in the Times that the works give "the impression that they aren't achieved as much by sweat work as by natural, albeit mystical, accretion."[41] Critic and poet Nancy Morejón, writing about the sculptures in The Black Scholar, "found in them indescribable truth and beauty", and highlighted the tactile nature of the works, saying that she wanted "to be able to touch the magic substance that formed these fragments".[53] Curator Alison de Lima Greene noted the lyrical quality of the sculptures, saying that Edwards "brings almost a poet's eye to the assemblage of objects."[47]
Writing about the range of materials in the works, critic Martin Herbert called the sculptures "blackened metal agglutinations" and said they "often resemble distorted, dehumanised faces."[54] Brenson and curator Rodrigo Moura have both noted that the consistent presence of chains and padlocks in the sculptures is meant to signify slavery and bondage, as well as the positive connections and bonds between people.[55][56] Writing in 1993, Brenson posited that the sculptures in the series are resolutely abstract and "do not represent any one thing".[46] According to Brenson, although they somewhat resemble references to African masks and carry the associations of their materials – metal objects with a past use – the works' "compositional exchanges, sculptural unity, and poetic suggestiveness are always more persuasive than the functional reality of the objects within them."[46] Curator April Kingsley, writing in 1981, said the early work from the series "looks very much like it came full-formed out of nowhere".[57] Artist Rudolf Baranik, expounding on Kingsley's observation, wrote that while viewers could attempt to discern historical meaning in the individual items comprising the sculptures, "it would only hinder the understanding."[58]
Critic Barry Schwabsky, writing in The Nation, argued that the main focus of the sculptures was their visual presence as opposed to their social content: "The associative connotations, though inexpungible, remain secondary [...] Instead, the artist’s fascination with the formal experience of art seems paramount."[59] Likewise, writing in Art Papers, critic Clarence D. White said that although the sculptures "owe their power primarily to the political and social historical allusions inherent in the fabulously varied inventory of industrial implements that figure in them", he viewed "the process of their being amalgamated into gripping presences" as equally important.[60] Expanding on a similar point, critic Vivien Raynor wrote in the Times that "such is [Edwards's] gift for assemblage that in his hands a spike is not merely the means by which a railroad tie is secured [...] Since he does little to change the appearance of his ingredients, one can only conclude that they are transformed because he has chosen them."[61] Writing in ARTnews, critic Gail Gregg said that despite "the aggressiveness" of the materials in many of the works, "the Fragments contain an emotional synthesis," adding that "[Edwards] has taken the rich and varied stuff of his life and welded it into sculpture that not only confronts struggle but also celebrates it."[62] Art historian Harmon Siegel, writing in American Art about the meanings in the works' underlying materials, argued that "These fragments are not neutral. Assembling them into the whole does not devalue them as parts [...] In that sense, Edwards insists on the tension between material as material, and material as thing".[63]
Critic Cate McQuaid, writing in The Boston Globe, said the series uses art historical tools to convey historical meaning: "While the sculptures’ industrial steel nods to Minimalism, their patina and social history flood them with associations to slavery, confinement, and the ongoing consequences of colonialism."[64] Brenson, discussing the meaning of the title of the series, said that "While Lynch Fragments names, repeatedly, the fact of white supremacist terror against Black human beings, 'fragment' implies incompleteness, not finality", adding that many of the individual works' titles highlight "Black creativity [...] and they, as well as other titles, hint at stories that viewers will extend once they learn what they are."[65] Writing in Artforum, critic Ara H. Merjian observed that the evolution of the individual titles – and implied subject matter – in the series marked a documentation of an array of historical wrongs: "The intermittent progression of Edwards’s gnarled steel sculptures over the past five decades—responding to civil rights abuses, to Vietnam-era injustices, or to the government-sanctioned exportation of racialized violence to detention centers abroad—figures its own postwar history."[66] Discussing the range of subject matters in the series as the works progressed, critic Saul Ostrow argued in Art in America that "Though Edwards’s work has long been seen as a product of African-American indignation and pride, today we are able to recognize his sculptures as something more varied."[67]
Critic John Yau, writing in Hyperallergic, said that the early works from the series retained their visual power long after they first premiered, and, "In fact, they have gained in resonance over time because they point to the physical pain and constraints that humans have had to endure throughout history."[68] Writing in 2015 in Sculpture magazine, critic Joan Pachner said the series "retains its urgently relevant voice", adding that, "With metaphors that extend out into a broader commentary about African and American cultural intersections and race relations, his achievement is a mature and profound synthesis."[69] Similarly, critic Ciarán Finlayson wrote in 2021 in Artforum that the works "have a brilliant transversal quality" and that "their idiom, developed over the past six decades, has lost none of its disquieting contemporaneity over time."[70] Conversely, writing in frieze, critic Morgan Quaintance argued that "the powerful affects these associations once provoked are now dampened by the spectator's historical distance" from the civil rights movement and struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, although Quaintance added that "Perhaps it's unfair to demand Edwards's work stand up to the strange and insidious world of contemporary metropolitan racism".[71]
Exhibition history
Edwards first exhibited sculptures from the series at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1965.[33][72] He has since regularly exhibited them in solo and group exhibitions. Several works from the series were included in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor, the Biennale's first African curator.[73][74] The São Paulo Museum of Art staged a survey of Lynch Fragments sculptures in 2018, the most comprehensive exhibition of the series ever mounted.[75]
↑ These names are primarily sourced from lists compiled by Michael Brenson[12] and Catherine Craft.[35] Additional individual names are sourced from essays and articles by Hamid Irbouh,[36] Rodrigo Moura,[37] and Raphael Rubinstein[38]
↑ The series has been cited as Edwards' breakthrough, signature, or most-celebrated body of work by a range of writers including critic William Zimmer in The New York Times,[41] critic Tim Keane in Hyperallergic,[16] journalist Nancy Gilson in The Columbus Dispatch,[42] critic Frances Colpitt in CAA.reviews,[43] and critic Harmon Siegel in Artforum.[44] Writing in 2024, critic Michael Brenson described the series as "now mythical".[40]
↑ Brenson (1993), p.24: "He has looked hard at David Smith. 'You have to think about Smith,' Edwards says. 'Everybody had to think about Smith. Any book I can find on Smith I'll buy because he made a beautiful contribution.' There are signs of Smith in Edwards's love for the physicality of steel and for the act of welding, in his use of found objects, and in his feeling for the function and the mystique of tools."
↑ Brenson (1993), p.24: "Edwards has also looked hard to Julio González, a formative influence on Smith and the sculptor who is generally considered the founder of the welded-metal tradition."
↑ Sims (1993), p.12: "'There were graduate students working in styles that came from a mixture of David Smith ... and ... Theodore Roszak. From what I knew of modern welded sculpture at that point, Roszak seemed more important than Smith. There was just more Roszak in the books that I came across than Smith.'"
↑ Brenson (1993), p.24: "Edwards's interest in González and Smith extends to the content of their work. 'González's Montserrat, Smith's Medals for Dishonor and my Lynch Fragments I put in the same conceptual ball park,' Edwards says, citing Smith's anti-fascist medallions of 1939-40 and González's peasant mother and child of 1936-37, examples of sculpture that is unmistakably political, yet richly poetic and elusive. 'It's the social content,' he continues. 'It's more important than the fact that the three of us weld.'"
↑ Craft (2015), p.12: "Edwards admired Smith and Julio González for their socially conscious art, yet Smith's Medals of Dishonor and González's Montserrat works largely relied on figuration and on modeling and casting rather than welding. If sculpture could yield the kind of physicality Edwards had been unable to find in painting, what did welding offer that other sculptural processes did not, and how might he use it to create an art expressive of his own concerns?"
Brenson, Michael (May–June 2024). "Melvin Edwards: 'You don't play around with that power'". Sculpture. Vol.43, no.3. pp.60–71. OCLC14039712. EBSCOhost176350774.
Irbouh, Hamid (2018) [First published 2000, in Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World. Vol. 1, no. 2.]. "Melvin Edwards' Lynch Fragments: Negritude and the Battle for Civil Rights in America". In Pedrosa, Adriano; Moura, Rodrigo (eds.). Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments. São Paulo Museum of Art. pp.30–42. ISBN9788531000515. OCLC1061526860.
Morejón, Nancy (Winter 1994). "Melvin Edwards: The World of a Marvelous Artist". The Black Scholar. Vol.24, no.1, Black Cultural History. Translated by Alegría, Carmen. The Black World Foundation. pp.47–50. JSTOR41068458. OCLC1536543.
Wofford, Tobias (2015). "Reconsidering Black Internationalism". In Craft, Catherine (ed.). Melvin Edwards: Five Decades (Exhibition catalogue). Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center. pp.60–71. ISBN9780991233830. OCLC904049795.
Wolff, Rebecca (2018). "'Nigeria Is Okay with Me!': Memory and History in Ibadan Oke (1992) and Ile Ogun (2003)". In Pedrosa, Adriano; Moura, Rodrigo (eds.). Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments (Exhibition catalogue). São Paulo Museum of Art. pp.22–29. ISBN9788531000515. OCLC1061526860.
Frank Philip Stella was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. He lived and worked in New York City for much of his career before moving his studio to Rock Tavern, New York. Stella's work catalyzed the minimalist movement in the late 1950s. He moved to New York City in the late 1950s, where he created works which emphasized the picture-as-object. These were influenced by the abstract expressionist work of artists like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. He developed a reductionist approach to his art, saying he wanted to demonstrate that for him, every painting is "a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more", and disavowed conceptions of art as a means of expressing emotion. He won notice in the New York art world in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art. Stella was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center in 2011.
Neo-Dada was a movement with audio, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a combination of playfulness, iconoclasm, and appropriation. In the United States the term was popularized by Barbara Rose in the 1960s and refers primarily, although not exclusively, to work created in that and the preceding decade. There was also an international dimension to the movement, particularly in Japan and in Europe, serving as the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme.
Sam Gilliam was an American abstract painter, sculptor, and arts educator. Born in Mississippi, and raised in Kentucky, Gilliam spent his entire adult life in Washington, D.C., eventually being described as the "dean" of the city's arts community. Originally associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s, Gilliam moved beyond the group's core aesthetics of flat fields of color in the mid-60s by introducing both process and sculptural elements to his paintings.
Betye Irene Saar is an American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African Americans throughout her career; Saar is best known for her artwork that critiques anti-Black racism in the United States.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was an African-American artist who celebrated Afrocentric themes. At the fore of the Harlem Renaissance, Warrick was known for being a poet, painter, theater designer, and sculptor of the black American experience. At the turn of the 20th century, she achieved a reputation as the first black woman sculptor and was a well-known sculptor in Paris before returning to the United States.
Melvin "Mel" Edwards is an American abstract sculptor, printmaker, and arts educator. Edwards, an African-American artist, was raised in segregated communities in Texas and an integrated community in Ohio. He moved to California in 1955, beginning his professional art career while an undergraduate student. Originally trained as a painter, Edwards began exploring sculpture and welding techniques in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, before moving again to New York in 1967.
Eldzier Cortor was an African-American artist and printmaker. His work typically features elongated nude figures in intimate settings, influenced by both traditional African art and European surrealism. Cortor is known for his style of realism that makes accurate depictions of poor, Black living conditions look fantastic as he distorts perspective.
Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture, known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she always used the mononym Chryssa professionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and worked since 1992 in the studio she established in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.
Franz West was an Austrian artist.
Cady Noland is an American sculptor, printmaker, and installation artist who primarily works with found objects and appropriated images. Her work, often made with objects denoting danger, industry, and American patriotism, addresses notions of the failed promise of the American Dream, the divide between fame and anonymity, and violence in American society, among other themes. Many of her works have involved architectural interventions in gallery spaces, including fences, barricades, and metal poles meant to guide or restrict the audience's movements. She has drawn extensively on media and tabloid imagery in her work, regularly using images of notable criminals, celebrities, and public figures involved in scandal. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl called Noland "a dark poet of the national unconscious."
The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompass diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing, and being in an extensive range of media. Both dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life have developed into stylized and intricate forms. This is achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training, or theorizing within a particular tradition, generations, and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural, and individual identities while transmitting values, impressions, judgements, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life, and experiences across time and space.
Bill Barrett is an American sculptor, painter and jeweller. He is considered a central figure in the second generation of American metal sculptors and is internationally known for his abstract sculptures in steel, aluminum and bronze.
Carla Lavatelli was an Italian-American artist whose career spanned five decades, from the 1950s into the early 2000s. Her work is in the permanent collections of several major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan, and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. She was noted primarily for her abstract sculptures in stone and bronze, which appeared in reproduction in such publications as Arts Magazine, Art in America, and Artforum during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Talos No. 2 is an outdoor 1959–1977 bronze sculpture created by the American artist James Lee Hansen. It is located in the Transit Mall of downtown Portland, Oregon, in the United States.
Erika Rothenberg is a Los Angeles–based conceptual artist whose work has included painting, drawing and photography, public art, sculpture and installation. Her art employs strategies and formats from mass media and persuasion, using words and images in familiar ways to present satirical, socially critical content, often with a subversive feminist point of view. In 2015, Artforum writer Michelle Grabner called Rothenberg's ironic use of vernacular signage and marketing strategies "relentless," characterizing her as "a harsh social critic with a facility for image-making, language and design … irony in Rothenberg’s hands is a barbed political weapon, and she wields it to underscore the very real injustices she observes in daily life."
Herbert James Maryon was an English sculptor, conservator, goldsmith, archaeologist and authority on ancient metalwork. Maryon practiced and taught sculpture until retiring in 1939, then worked as a conservator with the British Museum from 1944 to 1961. He is best known for his work on the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, which led to his appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
Marjorie Schick was an innovative American jewelry artist and academic who taught art for 50 years. Approaching sculptural creations, her avant-garde pieces have been widely collected. Her works form part of the permanent collections of many of the world's leading art museums, including the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan; the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania; and the Victoria and Albert Museum of London.
Merle Temkin is a New York City-based painter, sculptor and installation artist, known for vibrant, abstracted paintings based on her own enlarged fingerprint, and earlier site-specific, mirrored installations of the 1980s. Her work has often involved knitting-like processes of assemblage and re-assemblage, visual fragmentation and dislocation, and explorations of identity, the hand and body, and gender. In addition, critics have remarked on the play in her work between systematic experimentation and intuitive exploration. Her painted and sewn "Fingerprints" body of work has been noted for its "handmade" quality and "sheer formal beauty" in the Chicago Sun-Times and described elsewhere as an "intensely focused," obsessive joining of thread and paint with "the directness and desperation of marks on cave walls." Critic Dominique Nahas wrote "Temkin's labor-intensive cartography sutures the map of autobiography onto that of the universal in sharply revelatory ways." Her public sculptures have been recognized for their unexpected perceptual effects and encouragement of viewer participation. Temkin's work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, New York Magazine, and the Washington Post. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of the Racine Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and Israel Museum, among others.
Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand/U.S. artist whose art practice includes sculpture, installation, public art and video, since the 1990s with an emphasis on 3D digital media. Awards include the National Endowment for the Arts, the CAPS grant, and the Rome Prize Fellowship. His work expresses a keen interest in history, politics and the environment.
Daniel LaRue Johnson (1938–2017) was an American abstract sculptor, painter, and printmaker.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
