Reflecting on Michael Richards: A Museum Retrospective

On September 11, 2001, artist Michael Richards, a 2001 World Views artist-in-residence, was creating art in his studio on the 92nd floor of Tower One in the World Trade Center. His life was tragically cut short but his artistic legacy endures.

Michael Richards: Are You Down? is a powerful testament to his visionary artworks. This museum retrospective showcases his sculptures, drawings, installations, and video works, all created during a prolific decade from 1990 to 2001. Richards's art delves into profound themes—Blackness, flight, diaspora, spirituality, police brutality, and monuments—reflecting the era in which it was born, yet remaining strikingly relevant today.

Of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Richards was born in Brooklyn in 1963, and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Integral to a generation of Black artists emerging in the 1990s, Richards’s artwork gestures toward both repression and reprieve from social injustices and the simultaneous possibilities of uplift and downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people.

Flight and aviation were central themes for Richards as an exploration of freedom and escape, ascendance and descent. These themes are especially evident in Richards’s engagement with the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen, Greek mythology, Christianity, and African and African American folklore. Centering his own experience, Richards used his body to cast the figures for his sculptures, which often appear as pilots, saints, or both.

Michael Richards: Are You Down? is curated by Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin, and organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in 2021.

Learn more about the retrospective here!