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Accession #	1990.104
Artist	Melvin Edwards
Title	Takawira - J
Date	1989
Medium	Welded steel
Dimensions	14 x 10 x 9 in.
Credit Line	Gift of Edward A. Bragaline, by exchange
Location	American Identities: Everyday Life / A Nation Divided

Curatorial Remarks: Melvin Edwards’s weighty sculptures combine nails, tools, gears, and other metal objects to create abstract compositions. This work belongs to his extensive series Lynch Fragments, begun in the 1960s and inspired by Ralph Ginzburg’s 100 Years of Lynching (1962), a collection of newspaper reports of lynchings that was published to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War. The Lynch Fragments sculptures, generally shown suspended at eye level, evoke this history of violence through their jarring forms and rough welding.