An intimate exploration and meditation on Melvin Edwards' work (a zine produced in limited print run in the Palais de Tokyo's risography micro-publishing workshop).
In dialogue with the retrospective dedicated to Melvin Edwards (from 22 October, 2025 to 15 February, 2026), the Palais de Tokyo invited the New York-based publishing house BlackMass Publishing to copublish a zine.
Entitled Melvin Edwards—Echoes of the Weld, this publication, conceived by artist and founder of BlackMass Publishing, Yusuf Hassan, takes the form of an intimate exploration and meditation on Melvin Edwards' work. Yusuf Hassan envisions this zine as a conversation between their respective mediums: sculpture and printed matter. He describes the poetic approach to Melvin Edwards' work that guided his creative process as follows: "Over the summer, as I developed this publication, I immersed myself in his philosophy. I took quiet trips to see his sculptures in New York—especially those that live outside the walls of institutions. The ones that live among people. The ones that weather. That gather dust, rust, fingerprints, and time."
This zine has been Risograph-printed in 300 copies and bound in the publishing workshop of the Palais de Tokyo.
BlackMass Publishing is a publishing house founded by artist Yusuf Hassan in 2019. By combining photographic archives, poetry, and jazz music, BlackMass Publishing revisits transdisciplinary American and transatlantic Black artistic narratives from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the present day.
Melvin Edwards (born 1937 in Houston) is a pioneering figure in the history of African American abstract art. He is best known for his use of metal in his sculptural work. His minimalist and abstract approach serves as a vessel for social histories and personal narratives, often addressing themes of violence and resistance from the perspective of Black experiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
