Michael Richards was an artist of Jamaican and Costa Rican descent, born in Brooklyn, New York on August 2, 1963, he was raised in Kingston, Jamaica. In 2000, he was invited to take part in a residency hosted by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, providing artists with studios throughout World Trade Center’s North Tower. Artists had all-hour access to their “studio in the sky.” On September 10, 2001, an inspired Richards worked late into the night, ultimately deciding to sleep in his studio rather than commute home to Queens. He was in his studio at 8:46 am when the first American Airlines flight struck the North Tower.

Richards was interested in the plurality of Black experience. His art included many metaphors that contained multiple and sometimes contradictory interpretations. Among these were airplanes, wings, pilots, as well as narratives of flight and breaking free. In the artist’s own words: “I wish primarily to give voice to the psychic spaces in which exist both hope and frustration, faith and failure, and the compromises which must be negotiated in order to survive.”[1] In these open narratives, Richards captured “the psychic conflict which results from the desire to both belong to and resist a society which denies Blackness even as it affirms.”[2]

In 1997, Richards was awarded a three-year residency with ArtCenter/South Florida (now Oolite Arts). The South Florida arts community subsequently became part of his extended family. During this time, Richards expanded from his central occupation with sculpture to experiments with drawing and language, resulting in a series called Escape Plan, which he exhibited at Ambrosino Gallery in North Miami in 2000. The first image in Escape Plan shows a broken airplane descending, a metaphor for Richards’ vertiginous experience trying to succeed as a Black artist in a modern world, seeking flight away from repressive conditions and towards an elevated grace. In 2021, MoCA North Miami mounted Michael Richards: Are You Down? —  the first museum retrospective dedicated to Richards’ art.

This presentation does not seek to glorify Richards’ work merely through its uncanny prescience. Rather, in honoring the 25 years since this cataclysmic event, it recognizes the enduring significance of Richards’ work and seizes the opportunity to bring it to light.

This exhibition is curated by Ariella Wolens, Bryant-Taylor Curator.

With thanks to Genaro Ambrosino, william cordova, Dawn Dale, Alex Fiahlo, Melissa Levin, Juan Mattos and Dennis Scholl.

[1]Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin (eds.), “Michael Richards Artist Statement,” Michael Richards: Are You Down?, (Center for Art, Research and Alliances and Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami: New York and Miami, 2025), 7.

[2] Ibid.