A heavy irony hangs over Michael Richards’s work: The artist known for images of pilots, airplanes, wings and targets died, age 38, in the Sept. 11 attacks. He had spent the night in his studio on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower.
In “Are You Down?,” his first major museum survey, on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through Jan. 7, the circumstances of his death are hard to forget — even seemingly foreshadowed. The tragedy flashes to mind with a charcoal drawing that depicts a plummeting airliner; or in a sculpture of a cloud of fighter planes made of black hair flying toward the ground like rain.
But it’s likely that, had he lived, we would still be discussing Richards’s sculpture. In his handful of active years, he was beloved by curators and peers, and found consistent institutional support. He was already expanding the political possibilities of art, alongside contemporaries like Nari Ward and Kerry James Marshall. Dread Scott, an artist and friend of Richards’s, recalled their conversations ranging over “W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks and Wu Tang Clan (and perhaps Brazil in the World Cup),” adding that this breadth of thinking was ahead of its time.
His subjects were also often tragic, and prescient. Using his own body as his model, Richards put himself in the role of the victim, a way of processing state violence against Black people. In the 1990s, the Rodney King beating galvanized his work, and after seeing his current exhibition, it’s hard not to wonder what elegies he could have offered in the era of Black Lives Matter.
“He had a blueprint,” Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, wrote in an email. “He loved being a part of a growing collective. Artists of color flourished in the early ’90s perhaps in ways that were unparalleled and he was a part of that next wave.”
Richards was born to a Jamaican and Costa Rican family in Brooklyn and raised in Kingston. He returned to New York to attend Queens College, where he earned a B.A. He received an M.A. from New York University in 1991 and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program from 1992 to 1993. He exhibited widely during the last decade of his life, including a solo show at the Corcoran Gallery in 2000, but much of his work remained in storage in his cousin Dawn Dale’s garage. His family found his legacy hard to face.
Richards’s best-known sculpture is especially unnerving in light of his death but would still be powerful had he lived: a gilded life-size figure, cast from the artist’s body, of a beatific Tuskegee Airman in a flight suit, sustaining the impact of several small gold fighter planes. Richards titled it “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian,” linking a racially blunt tale from the “Uncle Remus” series with the martyr struck by executioners’ arrows. In the Tuskegee Airmen — all-Black segregated Air Force units in World War II that fought and died for a country that was in many ways hostile to them — Richards found an almost Sisyphean allegory of Black struggle for justice.
“The idea of flight relates to my use of pilots and planes,” Richards said in a 1997 interview, “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.” In the long view, the stunning coincidence of Richards’s death on Sept. 11 is a small piece in his worldly fusion of Afro-Caribbean, European and American folklore and religion — a broad, brutal dream of flight, escape, transcendence — where taking to the sky is bound up with falling.
During his residency in the World Trade Center, his fellow artists said Richards seemed full of energy, ready for whatever came next. The curators of the survey, Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin, see themselves as picking up the artist’s momentum. “We feel guided by Michael,” Levin said. “We follow in his footsteps.” Fialho pointed out that Richards worked in an analogue era, before artists had websites. But the memory of his work survived in his community. “They all really express praise for his rigor and gratitude for his friendship and just profound grief at his loss,” Fialho said. “And grief is definitely a part of the story of the work in its moment.”
“Are You Down?” means, “Are you with me?” It’s also a call to a missing pilot. The 2000 work titled “Are You Down?” comprises three nearly identical casts of Tuskegee figures, their bronze skin showing through tears in their tar-black flight suits, resting on the ground like they’ve survived a crash. With disorienting ease, Richards casts the Tuskegee Airmen as Icarus. Another full-body cast, “[Untitled] (Free F’All),” 1997, bristles with iron nails in the style of the Kongolese power figures made as mystical weapons against European colonizers. The feet are pierced, too, by small clusters of nails evoking another mystic tradition: the stigmata of Christ.
Richards could be grand and holy, but also sardonic. In “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (He Lost His Head),” from 1994, a set of mirrored boxes installed like Donald Judd’s famous minimalist “stacks” above a mirrored target and six cast heads, evokes a biblical route to heaven and, punningly, the proverbial ladder of art world success. An anatomically accurate drawing of detached angelic wings includes a raw nub of bone, and a sketch of four oddly muscular chicken wings is captioned “Icarus Wings’n’Things” like a New York deli ad. “Escape Plan 100” is a drawing of a lottery ticket.
It might seem, too, like Richards anticipated the fallen monuments of the last few years. In his work, suffering and hope aren’t universal concepts but resolutely historical events, and so tend to repeat. His version of a Winged Victory of Samothrace, “Great Black Airmen (Tuskegee),” 1996, is not a triumphant messenger but a toppled bronze statue, its amputated torso and prominent genitals reflected, with the viewer, in a mirrored pedestal.
Did the Tuskegee pilots escape persecution? Did the other Tuskegee men in Richards’s pantheon: the subjects of a notorious, unethical experiment to observe untreated syphilis?
In the Uncle Remus story, Brer Rabbit escapes Brer Fox through reverse psychology, begging not to be thrown in the briar patch where he was born. Richards cites that tale again in “Escape Plan 76 (Brer Plane in the Briar Patch),” 1996, a small airplane skinned with tarred paper and wrapped in barbed wire like a lynching victim, laced with the ever-present hope of slipping free. Richards pictures self-sacrifice as strength, where possible — to the point that martyrdom looms as a final, existential bailout.
With martyrdom comes a kind of religious ecstasy. It’s hard to ignore the erotic subtext of St. Sebastian as transmuted through Western art history. For centuries, his limp, suffering image, run through with long arrows, has offered an opportunity for painters to revel in the male form. Jasper Johns used the bull’s-eye — a motif for Richards, too — as an abstraction of the pierced saint. In assemblages from 1955, “Target With Four Faces” and “Target With Plaster Casts,” Johns combined encaustic bull’s-eyes with casts of mouths, hands and a penis. Richards may have had this precedent in mind when he made a work on paper from three rubber casts of lips, labeled “Paradiso,” “Purgatorio” and “Inferno.”
Richards often cast his own body for his sculptures — he is the downed airman, the lacerated martyr — which makes the photos of a smiling Richards posing with his works doubly eerie.
The gallery walls at the exhibition (which originated at MOCA North Miami in 2021 and was also curated by Fialho and Levin) are lined with texts and installation views, which can make the installation feel cramped and busy. “[Untitled] (Free F’All)” stands beside a photo of an outdoor version of the sculpture poised on a tall skinny platform, over a bucket, like some doomed cartoon diver.
In some cases, photos are all that remain. A wall along the entrance ramp presents documentation of installations from the early 1990s dealing explicitly with blackface and the Middle Passage. There is another lost work, represented by three photographs in the main gallery: “Every Nigga Is a Star,” a silver statue of a Tuskegee pilot riding a flaming meteor, going down. The sculpture is believed to have been in Richards’s studio when the first plane struck.
