‘Michael Richards: Are You Down?’

An artist whose life was cut short during the 9/11 attacks has newfound relevance in a just-published monograph: “Michael Richards: Are You Down?”

The book — the first and most comprehensive-to-date about the visionary artist — was celebrated with an event at Yale University’s Loria Center on Oct. 23.

The monograph is co-published by the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA North Miami). The launch event was co-sponsored by the Yale Department of the History of Art, Yale Department of Black Studies, Yale’s Modern and Contemporary Forum, and the Yale School of Art.

At the event, the book’s co-editors Alex Fialho (Yale PhD Candidate, History of Art and Black Studies) and Melissa Levin (curator and arts administrator) sat down with the book’s designer Miko McGinty (Yale ‘93 ‘98 MFA) to speak about Richards’s life and work and the book’s publication.

The book is a companion to — and an expansion of — a traveling retrospective of Richards’s work which originated at MOCA North Miami in 2021, then traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, and will end at The Bronx Museum. The book expands upon those shows, said Levin and Fialho, and includes remembrances from Richards’s friends and colleagues, contextual information surrounding his residencies, personal photographs and newly surfaced notebooks and sketchbooks related to his work.

The book features essays by Fialho and Levin as well as Edwidge Danticat and Franklin Sirmans, and a personal reflection by Richards’s cousin Dawn Dale. Dale, who has been the caretaker of Richards’s art and work after his death, also attended the Yale event.

An artist of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Richards was born in Brooklyn and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. He lived and worked between New York City and Miami. A graduate of Queens College with a BFA and an MA from New York University, Richards was an integral part of a generation of Black artists that emerged in the 1990s. He was known for his metaphoric and figurative sculptures, drawings, installations and video work.

“Richards’s work was prescient,” said Levin, “Personally and socio-politically, he was engaging with the diaspora, spirituality, Blackness, anti-Blackness, the creation of monuments, the toppling of monuments, all in a way that resonates today.”

With his awards and residences, Richards was “a rising star,” said Fialho. “His practice is understood as being very much part of the conversation of a generation of Black artists in the ‘90s who were making powerful work.”

Fialho and Levin’s act of historic artistic recovery began in when they were curators at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2015.

“That sent us on this decade-long journey to see if more work by the artist existed,” said Levin. “We began as curators, and are now legacy stewards, along with our close collaboration with Richards’s cousin Dawn Dale.” Richards, then 38, had a residency with the Council’s studio program on the 92nd story of Tower One at the World Trade Center.

The challenge, they said, was finding artwork, information and materials which were largely analog — and a significant amount is still unknown.

A visit to Dale’s home and garage in upstate New York in 2016 revealed a wealth of works and materials stored in boxes which hadn’t been opened in at least 15 years. The works they found included several full-scale sculptures, including a second version of Richards’s iconic “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian.” Because Richards used his own body to cast the works, the artist’s presence was hauntingly felt in this discovery, they said.

Flight, aviation, freedom and escape are central themes in many of Richards’s works, evident in his pieces depicting the Tuskegee Airmen. His artistic narratives are drawn from Greek mythology, Christianity, and African and African American folklore.

The book’s title, “Are You Down?” refers to Richards’s three sculptures of Tuskegee Airmen, and also has multiple contemporary and symbolic meanings of phrase.

Richards’s work, Fialho and Levin said, gestured toward repression and reprieve and the possibilities of uplift and downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people.

Fialho and Levin spoke of how Richards’s work was also a response to issues of racism in the ‘90s — such as his sculpture “A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo,” reflecting on Rodney King and the LA Riots — and speaks just as powerfully to the present. A New York Times headline of Richards’s first posthumous solo exhibit read: “Revisiting Michael Richards’s in the Age of Black Lives Matter.”

“The work continues to speak to our contemporary moment,” said Fialho, especially at a time “when Black history and Black military history are under attack and erasure.”

Levin and Fialho noted that during the past decade Richards’s art and practice has been more widely engaged with thanks to recent exhibitions and research. They hope their book will be a resource for continued conversations, research and engagement around Richards’s legacy.

“The publication  is important because it can exist beyond the temporality of an exhibition with its space constraints,” said Fialho. As Fialho and Levin’s monograph essay states, “For an artist whose story is often told from the perspective of his passing, we wish to center the story of Richards’s life.”