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A lynching is a murder, a group murder. You take all of the energy of a lynching, all the hate and all the fear, and pile it on one human being. You tie that person to a tree and slowly or fasuy kill him. The Lynch Fragment series is a series of sculpture ideas. What I'm doing is taking fragments of the intensity of a lynching, turning it around, changing it into an object, and making that object something creative and positive. So the thing itself is not to look like it's been lynched, but to have that scale of intensity, and that kind of power.
I have developed suspended environmental works made of barowire and of chains. I also make larger pieces, public sculpture meant to have a relationship with architecture and the general public. You can say that the Lynch Fragments are a private conversation. A one on one situation. The public works are meant to affect masses of people at once. The material used for the Lynch Fragments is steel. Sometimes a piece of brass or bronze or chrome is added but for the most part they are welded steel. Each Lynch Fragment is different from the other and each has an individual tide. In that respect they are like traditional African sculpture. The idea of a lynching was bad luck, or bad fate, or a bad situation for African-American people in the United States. But the Lynch Fragment, the sculpture, is really a positive work. They are powerful and they are ours, and they are mine, and they are not made by our oppressor. They are made by us as a continuance of the resistance against the oppression.
I started making them in 1963 during the period when the civil rights movement was in full force. It was my first experience with collective resistance. At that time I was teaching myself how to make sculpture and trying to find my own unique way of working. The Lynch Fragments come from family stories about lynchings. They come from my experiences of growing up...