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MASTERS, continued from page 56.

years, and features some 200 pieces that are generally symbolic of the global Black struggle. For example, Kasinga is dedicated to the people of Angola and Namibia, in rememberance of a massacre of Namibian refugees at the hands of South African troops a decade ago. The atrocity had occurred on his birthday, he recalls.

Pieces of Edwards' unique and abstract Lynch Fragments measure just a foot in height, width or projection, and are readily displayed on the walls of collectors, museums and galleries around the country. "They give people different feelings that they can work off of," he says. Edwards also works on thought-provoking gargantuan projects that utilize huge links of steel chains and geometrically-shaped disks. One such work featuring large chains as tall as Edwards himself is called the Promise and is based on the concept of a gateway. "The chains can be seen in many ways," he says. "They can be symbols of our history in terms of oppression, or symbols of linkage. In terms of art, the piece produces another kind of dynamic form. You just can't read my work as you would read a diagram, or it wouldn't be art."

Black artists like Edwards, Derr, Hunt, Riddle and Donaldson continue to make profound contributions to the American tradition of art. But it is the legacy of the 19th-Century Black artist that has provided the new breed "a sense of spiritual place and tradition," according to Edmund Barry Gaither. "It gave them a permission to be themselves, a way to assert our place."

And what greater contribution to Black art in particular and American art in general than the recent selection of Chicago wood sculptor Martin Puryear as the lone representative of the U.S. at the prestigious international art exhibition in October in Sao Paulo, Brazil? Puryear is the first Black artist to be so honored.

Dalton Narine

Some artists prefer to tie their work closely to the Black struggle, while others, though grounded in their roots, choose sources other than social issues.

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Proverb from Zimbabwe (1979) by John Riddle.

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CALIFORNIA AFRO-AMERICAN MUSEUM
(Above) Untitled (1975) by David Hammon of New York is a body print with collage. Hammond is a thought-provoking conceptual artist.

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MILTON DERR
Milton Derr's The Couple offers another view of his figurative/expressionist style. Derr says his art is grounded in European, Asian and American Environments.

58 EM June 1989