From the Ashes of the Seven Headed Cobra, 1975

Edwards emerged in LAs art scene in the 1970s, having moved to the city to attend the California Institute of the Arts, and distinguished himself as an activist-artist. To make this work, he visited the burned house where a deadly confrontation between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Symbionese Liberation Army had taken place, rubbed a piece of paper in the ashes, and created this drawing over the rubbing. In addition to containing the physical and, in the artist’s view, psychic residue of the people whose lives were lost that day, this work serves as a record of one of the city’s underrepresented political histories.