Melvin Way
(1954–2024)
BornSmoaks, South Carolina, United States
ActiveNew York, New York, United States
DiedSmoaks, South Carolina, United States
BiographyMelvin Way created his own cryptic language of symbols and numbers to fill scraps of paper in dense scrawls. Some feature elaborate equations and chemical formulas, others diagrams of enigmatic machines; all have an intensity reflecting that he created them not quickly but over time. Usually, he used just blue or black ballpoint pen, although he would sometimes enhance them with marker or shading in colored pencil. Layers of tape offered a surface for additions as well as protection for these arcane designs. Wear from weeks, or even months, of the drawings being carried as he moved through his nomadic life is visible in the faded ink and the scars from the paper being folded and unfolded again and again.Way, who also went by Melvin “Milky” Way, summed up his journey and that of his drawings in his artist’s statement: “I was born and raised in South Carolina, my ancestors and prerequisites lived in slave territories, I eventually moved north to New York City. All my works have to go thru emissions, baptisms, and transmigrations before I release them into the stratosphere, I carry 500 drawings at a time in my raincoat, and they go thru rain sleet and snow, sometimes staying in my pocket for 6 months at a time.” Born in 1954 in South Carolina, he moved to Brooklyn at a young age and later attended technical school. An early passion was music, and he was a bassist in various local funk bands while he worked as a machinist. Symptoms of schizophrenia emerged when he was in his twenties, and he spent the next years rotating among homeless shelters, psychiatric wards, and rehab centers. (A formula he cited as being for cocaine regularly appears in his work.)
He started creating his coded work in the mid-1980s. His first exhibitions were held in New York galleries in the early 1990s, following his connection in 1989 with the artist Andrew Castrucci, who was teaching an art workshop at a men’s shelter on Ward’s Island through the nonprofit Healing Arts Initiative. After reconnecting with his family in 2015, Way moved back to South Carolina, where he died in 2024.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).