The irony that falls on the work of an artist who died in the September 11 attacks

A heavy irony hangs over the work of Michael Richards: the artist known for his images of pilots, planes, wings and targets died, at age 38, in the attacks of September 11, 2001. He had spent the night in his studio in the 92nd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

In “Are You Down?”, his first major museum retrospective, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York through January 7, the circumstances of his death are hard to forget—even seemingly foreshadowed. A charcoal drawing depicts a passenger plane plummeting; A sculpture of a fighter jet cloud made of black hair flies towards the ground like rain.

But chances are, had he lived, we’d still be talking about Richards’ 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. Dread Scott, an artist and friend of Richards, recalled his conversations addressing “WEB Du Bois, bell hooks and the Wu Tang Clan (and maybe Brazil in the World Cup),” adding that this breadth of thought was ahead of the time. of the.

His themes were often tragic, and prophetic. Using her own body as a model, Richards put herself in the role of victim, a way of processing state violence against black people. In the 1990s, her work was fueled by the beating of Rodney King by police in Los Angeles. After seeing her current exhibition, it’s easy to wonder what elegies she might have offered in the era of Black Lives Matter.

“Artists of color flourished in the early ’90s in ways that were unparalleled, and he was part of that next wave,” said Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Richards was born to a Jamaican and Costa Rican family in New York and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She returned to New York to attend college and received a Master of Arts from New York University in 1991. She exhibited widely during the last decade of her life, but much of her work remained in the garage. from her cousin Dawn Dale. Her family found it difficult to come to terms with her legacy.

Richards’ best-known sculpture is a life-size golden figure, cast from the artist’s body, of a beatific member of the Tuskegee Squadron in a flight suit, suffering from the impact of several small golden fighter planes. Richards titled it “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian,” linking a racially compelling story from the “Uncle Remus” story series to the martyr struck by the executioners’ arrows.

In the Tuskegee Airmen—segregated all-black units of the Air Force in World War II who fought and died for an America that was in many ways hostile to them—Richards found an almost Sisyphean allegory of the black struggle for freedom. justice.

“The idea of ​​flying relates to my use of pilots and airplanes, but it also references the black church, the idea of ​​being lifted up, caught up, or taken to safety—to a better world,” Richards said in 1997. His work fused Afro-Caribbean, European and American folklore and religion.

The 2000 work titled “Are You Down?” It comprises three nearly identical casts of Tuskegee figures, whose brown skin is visible through tears in their pitch-black flight suits, resting on the ground as if they had survived a crash. Richards portrays the Tuskegee Airmen as Icarus.

In some cases, photographs are all that remain of Richards’ work. In the exhibition in New York, one lost work, represented by three photographs, is “Every Nigga Is a Star,” a silver statue of a Tuskegee pilot riding a falling, burning meteorite. It is believed that the sculpture was in Richards’ studio when he crashed the first of the two planes.

By: Travis Diehl