First Museum Retrospective For Michael Richards, Artist Killed During 9/11 Attacks, On View At North Carolina Museum Of Art

Visitors to “Michael Richards: Are You Down?” at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh experience two exhibitions in one. All the objects remain the same. Their meaning, however, totally different.

The first exhibition is seen through the perspective of knowing how the artist died. The second exhibition is seen through putting aside that knowledge–if possible–and considering the work as the artist intend. Richards (1963–2001), of course, could never have anticipated the circumstances of his death and how chillingly resonate it would be to his artwork.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Richards was working in his Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views studio on the 92nd floor of World Trade Center, Tower One. He often worked overnight, as he had on the 10^th into the morning on the 11^th.

He would perish there along with thousands of others, not yet 40-years-old.

Flight and aviation were central themes in his artwork.

Airplanes. Everywhere. Falling airplanes.

His iconic Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (1999) sculpture, for which he used himself as the model to create the cast, a common practice of his, features planes piercing his body as arrows did the Catholic Saint. The unintended symbolism in seeing these artworks through the prism of his death literally churns the stomach. It’s almost scary.

“In light of the devastating circumstances of Richards’ passing, the afterlife of his artworks—especially those including airplanes, wings, and pilots—take on added prescience; the connections are astonishing, painful and powerful,” exhibition curators from its debut location, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Melissa Levin and Alex Fialho, told Forbes.com.

“If you know his story, I think it is impossible to separate the circumstances of his death from his work, but I think it is important to emphasize that for Michael, the work was about much bigger issues than his autobiography–social justice, racism, police brutality, history, and more,” Linda Dougherty, Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art, NCMA, told Forbes.com.

For guests able to get past the ending of his life, the living of his life informs the second exhibition.

Ascension

Of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Michael Richards was born in Brooklyn in 1963, raised in Kingston, and came of age between post-independence Jamaica and post–civil rights era America. He moved back to the United States to attend Queens College, where he earned a BA in 1985. He received an MA from New York University in 1991.

“I’ve been traveling since I was a child. I grew up in Jamaica, in the West Indies, and planes have always been a big part of my life. Pilots in my work function as a symbol—they are almost images of transcendence,” Richards explained to the ArtCenter/South Florida, now Oolite Arts, during an interview in the late 1990s. “They are these beings that go up into the sky that offer freedom, escape and coming to a new land—the yellow brick road and success and all of that–but you always come back to the ground.”

Richards explored the concepts of freedom and escape in his work using the language of metaphor to investigate racial inequity and the tension between assimilation and exclusion. Repression and reprieve. Uplift and downfall. Planes soar and plumet.

Duality.

“An examination of the psychic conflict which results from the desire to both belong to and resist a society which denies blackness even as it affirms,” his artist statement from the mid-90s read.

The Tuskegee Airmen

Richards was working on a series honoring the Tuskegee Airmen at time of his death. He devoted most of his career to sculptures and installations paying tribute to them.

The Tuskegee Airmen were America’s first Black military pilots. Flying fighter planes and escorting bombers over Europe in World War II, their success in protecting the larger planes was unmatched. Their contribution to the war effort was not officially recognized until long after the war ended.

They take their name from their training grounds in Tuskegee, AL at Tuskegee University.

“The dream of flying is ultimately a wish to defy limitations, and in Richards’s work, one sees the manifestation of that desire,” Dougherty explains.

In Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian, Richards–again, using his own body to cast the sculpture–wears a Tuskegee airmen flight suit with miniature P-51 Mustang planes flying into his body. The P-51 was one of many planes the group flew.

A version of the standing sculpture has been on continuous display at the NCMA since 2003 when the museum featured Richards’ work in an exhibition, “Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight,” in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. The exhibition explored ideas of flight in art and included two pieces by Richards, one of which was Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian. Popular response had the museum work out a long-term loan of the sculpture from Richards’ estate.

“The Tuskegee Airmen are a perfect metaphor because they were considered race men and were working to overturn all the myths and uplift the race. You would work twice as hard and be an example to your race,” Richards said in an interview with the Bronx Museum of the Arts from 1997. “They were getting into those planes and flying twice as many missions as white pilots because they were standard bearers of their race.”

Richards finds in the Tuskegee Airmen a classic example of the duality his work examines, a duality he lived himself.

“It’s also interesting in terms of the interior psychological dialogue that must have been going on with them. Especially the fact that once they landed the planes and walked out, they could not eat in the same mess quarters as white officers. They had segregated barracks,” his interview with the Bronx Museum of the Arts continues. “Yet they were fighting for the ideals of freedom, justice and the American way. It’s a very complicated metaphor. It has a lot to do with my own questions about my place within society. Working within society, making art, and basically making the culture of the society.”

Richards’ Catholicism further informs Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian.

“The idea of flight relates to my use of pilots and planes, but it also references the Black church, the idea of being lifted up, enraptured, or taken up to a safe place—to a better world,” he explained in the same Bronx Museum of the Arts interview.

Another powerful 1999 sculpture incorporating the Tuskegee Airmen on view in the exhibition is Are you Down?

“Consisting of three identical, downed pilots, cast from the artist’s body, Are You Down? is a complex homage to the Tuskegee Airmen. These heroes are rendered on the ground, and one has to look down, or get down, to engage them—in contrast to the majority of monuments, which are typically triumphant statues of white men raised on pedestals,” Levin and Fialho explain. “These pilots’ uniforms are tattered, ripped across the clavicle and at the knees, legs haphazardly outstretched, their bodies slumped, and their heads tilted downward in resignation. Parachutes conspicuously absent, they have each landed and are stuck, sinking in nearly identical plinths made to look like pools of tar.”

Franconia Sculpture Park, near Minneapolis, hosts a permanent memorial to Richards, featuring a large-scale, bronze recast of Are You Down? originally displayed during a 2000 fellowship there.

Michael Richards’ Legacy

At the time of his death, Richards’ career was soaring like one of the planes in his artwork.

He had participated in the famed Studio Museum in Harlem residency from 1995-96. Other artists to do so have included David Hammons, Titus Kaphar, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley. Superstars every one. That’s the course he was on.

He had been featured in prominent exhibitions at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2000); The Studio Museum, Chicago Cultural Center and Miami Art Museum (2000); Bronx Museum of the Arts (1997), and at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut.

In 2018, Oolite Arts launched The Michael Richards Award celebrating a Miami-Dade artist who has created a recognized body of original, high-quality works of art over a sustained period of time and who, through their practice, is achieving the highest levels of professional distinction in the visual arts. He worked in residence there from ’97-’00.

“Michael Richards: Are You Down?” marks his first museum retrospective and the largest ever exhibition of his body of work, objects created between 1990 and 2000. The presentation at NCMA runs through July 23, 2023.