Melvin Edwards

Dia Art Foundation

Between 1969 and 1970, Melvin Edwards developed a series of sculptures using barbed wire—or “b.wire,” to use the artist’s term—that embraces the material’s formal and evocative potential. These simple, architecturally scaled constructions, which at times feature chains, subdivide and frame space, their straightforward geometry complicated by the material’s agricultural, colonial, and militaristic associations.

His first b.wire works were presented as site-responsive installations in 1969. In March 1970, Edwards mounted four of these sculptures for a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, marking the institution’s first single-artist show by an African American sculptor. Edwards has returned to the architectural approach of these first installations only a handful of times, and although he conceived these three works in 1970, he realized them for the first time in 2022.

Edwards’s b.wire works demarcate or obstruct passageways, corners, and sections of rooms, using the material’s inherent linearity to create depth without obscuring space. Gravity also plays a role, as in Iguneronmwon (1970/2022), where the artist strategically lets the wires and chain sag .

Excerpted from Melvin Edwards May 6, 2022–February 22, 2026, Dia Beacon; Exhibition Information.