
Oil, pastel, and fiber. Race, identity, and Black masculinity through abstraction and figuration. Work rooted in memory, resistance, and the fullness of Black life.
The childlike visual language is not naive, it is the argument. I came to painting through burnout, after fifteen years in entertainment public relations. I returned to the visual vocabulary of childhood deliberately: because that is where Black boys are first taught what they are allowed to be, and what they are not.
Working in oil, pastel, and fiber, I make paintings that hold what institutional memory erases.
, Artist StatementByron 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, with institutional partners including the Getty Museum, SoHo House, and Chrysler Museum of Art.
Nine paintings examining the visual economy of anti-Black caricature, from 19th-century minstrelsy to contemporary media representation. The series refuses the progress narrative, insisting instead that the image of Black life in America has been continuously managed, distorted, and commodified. Solo exhibition, Los Angeles, 2021.



A single work in response to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, operating simultaneously as memorial, indictment, and refusal. Torn newsprint embedded in acrylic surface holds the record of a murder that the state first tried to disappear.

Three oil pastel portraits naming what the culture refuses to, Depression, In Dire Distress, Despair. Made in response to an 80% documented rise in Black male suicide, the series rejects the demand that Black men perform strength at the expense of survival.



An ongoing body of intimate works in oil and pastel on paper. Studies in solitude, interiority, and abstracted form, the private register of a practice that is otherwise public and confrontational. 2022–2025.






Large-scale paintings on canvas and wood panel. Works held in private and corporate collections across the United States.


Commissions, exhibitions, acquisitions, graduate inquiries, licensing, and Wellness programming.
Art that holds
what words can't.