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The Minstrel Show Opening Night
The Minstrel ShowLos Angeles, 2021
New YorkArtist
Byron
Linnell
Edwards
The Minstrel Show, Installation View

Oil, pastel, and fiber. Race, identity, and Black masculinity through abstraction and figuration. I came to painting through burnout. After fifteen years in entertainment, I started making art as a way back to my own story. My work interrogates how Black life is represented, remembered, and erased.

The Minstrel ShowInstallation View · Los Angeles, 2021
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About the Artist

The Work
and The Why

I came to painting through burnout. After fifteen years in entertainment public relations, I started making work during the pandemic as a way to tell the story I had been telling for everyone else.

The visual language I use is deliberate. Childlike in form, urgent in content. I make paintings that refuse to resolve the contradictions of Black life in America, that hold grief and joy in the same image, that name what institutional memory would rather erase.

A new body of work is in progress.

Byron Linnell Edwards
Biography

Byron Linnell Edwards is a self-taught abstract and figurative artist based in New York. His practice sits at the intersection of personal history and collective memory, using oil, pastel, and fiber to interrogate how Black life is represented, commodified, and erased.

His work has been commissioned by Visa, collected by BET Networks, and licensed by Showtime.

He is the founder of Wellness for Creatives, hosting art and wellness events with institutional partners Getty Museum (Educator Wellness Day), SoHo House (Inkwell), and Chrysler Museum of Art (Inkwell).

2021First Solo Show
NYCCurrently Based
ShowtimeLicensed Artwork
VisaCorporate Commission
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Portfolio

Selected Works

Inaugural Body of WorkThe Minstrel Show

A nine-piece series. A solo exhibition. The work that started everything. Explore the full body of work and the ideas behind it.

The Minstrel Show
View the Series
FUN
WorkFUNOil Pastel on Canvas

Letters as architecture. Joy as provocation. FUN refuses the expectation that Black expression must always carry the weight of suffering to be taken seriously. It insists on pleasure as a political position, color as argument, and play as a form of resistance that the culture keeps trying to tax.

American Beauty
SeriesAmerican Beauty2021 · Oil Pastel on Canvas · 48x36 in. · The Minstrel Show

From the nine-piece Minstrel Show series examining the visual economy of anti-Black caricature. American Beauty holds the myth of the nation's self-image against the body it has always feared and desired in equal measure. The painting does not resolve the contradiction. It lives inside it.

For Ahmaud
WorkFor Ahmaud2020 · Mixed Media: Acrylic and Paper on Canvas · 30x24 in.

Torn newsprint pressed into acrylic surface, the record of a murder embedded in the material of the painting itself. Made in response to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, this work operates as memorial, indictment, and refusal. The state tried to disappear what happened. The painting insists it will not be buried again.

Reclamation (Self-Portrait)
WorkReclamation2025 · Oil on Canvas · 40x32 in.

A self-portrait painted atop a reimagined African American flag. The work interrogates who gets to inhabit, to belong, and to thrive in spaces historically closed to Black bodies. It is both resistance and return. This is not just about survival. It is about taking up space, rightfully.

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Curriculum Vitae

Background

Exhibitions
2021
The Minstrel ShowSolo Exhibition · The Pop Up Shop, Los Angeles, CA
2024
Black History Month, Featured ArtistSip and Wonder, Los Angeles, CA
2024
The Artist Tree, Artist on ViewLos Angeles, CA
2023
In My MindABWB, Los Angeles, CA
2022
Joy All DayBET Networks · Orpheum Theater, New Orleans, LA
Public Art
2025
Ignite InkChrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
Collections and Commissions
2023
VisaCorporate Commission
2022
ViacomCBS / BET NetworksCorporate Collection
2022
Showtime, Your HonorLicensed Artwork · Time Warner
2023
THIRTY, Featured ArtworkEssence Film Fest · Micheaux Film Fest · Indie Short Fest
Education and Publications
2008
BA, CommunicationGeorge Mason University, Fairfax, VA
—
In My MindAdult Coloring Book · Amazon and Barnes and Noble
—
Wellness for CreativesFounder · Getty · SoHo House · Chrysler Museum
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In the Press

Coverage

Highsnobiety

For Byron Linnell Edwards, Wellness Is Part of the Creative Process

ReadModern Luxury

Mind, Heart and Soul

ReadVoyageLA

Rising Stars: Meet Byron Edwards of Koreatown, Los Angeles

ReadCanvas Rebel

Meet Byron Edwards

Read
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Byron Linnell Edwards
Byron Linnell Edwards
Get in Touch

Let's Work.

Commissions, exhibitions, acquisitions, graduate inquiries, licensing, and Wellness programming.

Email[email protected]Instagram@byron.linnellLinkedInByron Linnell EdwardsWellness for Creativeswellnessforcreatives.com

Art that holds
what words cannot.

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The Minstrel Show, Opening Night
Inaugural Body of Work · Los Angeles, 2021

The
Minstrel
Show

Nine Paintings · Solo Exhibition · November 2021
← Back to Portfolio
9Paintings
2021Los Angeles, CA
200+Years of History
About the Work

What the Series Intended

The Minstrel Show was not named lightly. It is a direct confrontation with a performance tradition that shaped how Black people have been seen in America since the early 1800s. Minstrelsy gave the country permission to laugh at caricature, to consume Black suffering as entertainment, and to call that entertainment culture.

The nine paintings in this series trace that visual language from its origins in coon caricature through its contemporary iterations in media, advertising, and popular culture. The argument is that the form has changed but the function has not. Black life in America continues to be managed, distorted, and commodified for the consumption of others.

Each painting in the series holds a specific figure or archetype, rendered in the deliberately childlike visual language that defines the practice. The paintings do not explain. They do not comfort. They insist on being looked at directly.

The Exhibition

November 2021

The Minstrel Show opened in November 2021 at The Pop Up Shop in Los Angeles, California. It was Byron Linnell Edwards' first solo exhibition and the debut of a practice that had been developing in private throughout the pandemic.

The works were received by collectors, curators, and cultural figures across Los Angeles. Several pieces entered private collections the night of the opening. The exhibition ran for a limited period and was not restaged.

The body of work that followed, including commissions for Visa and BET Networks, grew directly from the critical and commercial reception of this series.

The Minstrel Show, Wall 1
The Minstrel Show, Wall 2
The Minstrel Show, Window View