The Sculptures of Melvin Edwards, at City Hall Park

The Public Art Fund’s “Melvin Edwards: Brighter Days,” on view in City Hall Park through Nov. 28, offers a fifty-year survey of the American sculptor’s career with six steel sculptures that unite abstract and symbolic forms. Like all the works here, “Song of the Broken Chains” (pictured), from 2020, accrues power from its location: the park is part of the site of the African Burial Ground, a Colonial-era cemetery for people of African heritage, and has become a locus of Black Lives Matter activism.