Melvin Edwards Decides
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15010307 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Harvey Siegel (0000-0001-5398-3395, corresponding author), Harmon Siegel |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 86-111 |
| Publication date | 2020-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Art (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1073-9300 • E-ISSN: 1549-6503 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/709416 |
| OpenAlex | W3016460162 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
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
Aesthetics · Art · Art gallery · Art history · Contemporary art · Exhibition · Modern art · Performance art · Political science · Politics · Racism · Scholarship · Sculpture · Sociology · Visual art of the United States · Visual arts · Digital Games and Media · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Gender Studies · Law · Narrative Theory and Analysis
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |