While Edwards' art is primarily abstract, his works often contain explicit references to African-American and African history as well as contemporary politics and events in their titles and underlying materials.

[7] His first period of study at USC was primarily focused on painting, and his professors included Francis de Erdely, Hans Burkhardt, Hal Gebhardt, and Edward Ewing,[10][1] as well as the art historian Theresa Fulton.

[9] Edwards became friends with several other artists in Los Angeles, including Marvin Harden, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Ron Miyashiro, Ed Bereal, and David Novros.

[9] Living in Los Angeles, Edwards was also introduced to the work of a number of Mexican muralist artists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco, which he said inspired him to similarly draw on his own cultural background in his art to communicate his social and political views.

[18] The story, as retold by Edwards, relays the narrative of a black family in Florida successfully fighting back against their white neighbors who had threatened to come to the property on "some bright morning"[a] in order to kill them.

[17] Partly inspired by developments in the Civil Rights Movement and unrest in Los Angeles over the police killing of a black man in 1962, these welded metal wall reliefs are usually small in size.

[24] Writing in Artforum, critic David Gebhard positively reviewed the exhibition, saying: "Perfection of workmanship and a full understanding of material has been united with the formal content of each work.

[26] Around this time, he also began to create a new series of works comprising dense central assemblage forms suspended within various types of metal enclosures, similar to Chaino.

On this trip, he helped his friend Robert Grosvenor install a sculpture in the exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, which introduced Edwards to a broader group of artists working in minimalism.

[15] Edwards then traveled to Los Angeles, to install a large solo exhibition at the Barnsdall Art Center, before returning to New York to join Williams and his new initiative Smokehouse.

[45][46] Smokehouse created a series of wall paintings consisting of hard-edge graphics and geometric patterns, designed and executed with local community members, all located along several streets in Harlem.

[35] These works comprise strands of barbed wire and chain strung in different shapes and patterns from walls and ceilings in gallery spaces, extending into the room to form environments rather than discrete individual sculptures.

[51] Edwards also completed his first major public commission in 1969, the outdoor sculpture Homage to My Father and the Spirit, created for Cornell University's Johnson Museum.

[15][67] The sculpture comprises a large vertical stainless-steel disc connected to a triangular panel of steel with a stepped outer edge painted orange, green, blue, and yellow.

[80] Although the show was not widely positively reviewed, artist David Hammons attended the exhibition and later said the barbed-wire sculptures had inspired his own work: "That was the first abstract piece of art that I saw that had cultural value in it for black people.

[84] After withdrawing from the show, Edwards published a statement in Artforum co-signed by Williams, Gilliam, Johnson, Hunt, and others that condemned the Whitney's exhibition and the art world's attitudes toward black artists.

[88] The same year, Edwards, Gilliam, and Williams mounted a three-person exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago organized by the artist Emilio Cruz, titled Interconnections.

[99] Edwards said the title "refers to the fact that when we went out there to do a show, there was no money to ship stuff out",[100] and he used Hunt's studio to make the work after arriving in the city,[101] "So the piece was an homage to our friendship.

[109] He traveled with Cortez to Nigeria for the event and they stayed together with all the other participants in the same residential complex, allowing them to meet and engage with a large number of artists from the African diaspora, an experience Edwards said was "more than exciting – it was important.

[103][114] In 1978, he also began serving as the American editor of Nwoko's art-focused journal New Culture, writing extensively about African-American art for a Nigerian audience and publishing images of his own sculptures and illustrations.

[128][129] His sculpture Confirmation, installed in a public plaza in front of the building, was made with a series of large stainless-steel geometric forms, including a disc, a triangle, and an arch.

[16] The owner of the gallery, Clara Diament Sujo, told ARTnews that it was somewhat difficult to sell Edwards' Lynch Fragments sculptures to private collectors despite a large number of museum acquisitions, saying "they don't hide their nature.

[91][138] Living in Senegal, he began to create new works similar in style to his Lynch Fragments sculptures, but with the addition of metal drainage covers commonly used in the region, onto which he mounted the assemblage forms.

[142][143] The work, made of a series of stainless-steel geometric forms and chain links stacked atop one another, is dedicated to the self-emancipated 19th-century ophthalmologist David K. McDonogh, who had been sent to Lafayette by his enslaver in 1838 to be educated for a missionary voyage to Liberia but had refused to be sent to Africa, instead graduating from the university and starting a long medical career in New York.

[142] In the fall of 2010, Edwards staged an exhibition of new and historical works at the gallery Alexander Gray Associates in New York, showing multiple newer Lynch Fragments sculptures with titles referencing contemporary events, including the Iraq War.

[147][148] Assessing the show for ArtReview, critic Chris Fite-Wassilak stated: "Renewed interest in Edwards's work is timely, given the parallels between the struggles of the 1960s and the current unrest in the US, and while his approach hasn't changed, neither have the problems he sought to address.

[156][157] Also in 2017, Edwards mounted a solo exhibition at Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery, showing historical works as well as several recently completed pieces.

[158] The same year, several of his sculptures were included in the historical survey exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the Tate Modern[i] in London, curated by Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley.

[176] Opened in May 2021, the exhibition had originally been scheduled for the previous year but was postponed by Edwards in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests being held at City Hall in 2020.

[181] The sculpture, comprising several stainless-steel discs, geometric forms, and oversized lengths of chain, was permanently installed in front of the center on the University of Maryland, College Park's campus in 2024.