Michael Richards was born in New York City and was raised in Kingston, Jamaica. He received his BA
from Queens College and his MFA from New York University. In 1992 he completed the Whitney
Independent Study Program. His work has been shown in a number of national and international
exhibitions including a solo show in 2000 at Ambrosino Gallery in Miami, FL and group shows at the
Corcoran Museum in Washington, DC; the Miami Art Museum in Miami, FL; the Chicago Cultural Center
in Chicago, IL; the Debayard Museum in Amsterdam; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
He has been the recipient of numerous residencies and awards including an Art Matters grant,
a Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Award, and residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the National
Foundation CAVA in Miami, and the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota. His sculptures use images
of pilots, planes and luggage and conceptually focus on issues of displacement and immigration, assimilation and exclusion.

travel kit, 1995                              winged, 1999

Michael Richards art works took on sensitive themes with formal rigor to create images whose resonance and vitality will continue to amuse, provoke and communicate. As a Jamacian-American raised in Kingston, Michael found sustenance in the poetic ambiguity of all human experience. Jorge Daniel Veneciano, one of the many curators who was affected by Michael's work, once framed a discussion about Michael's work around Ralph Ellison, one of Michael's heroes whose reference will live long in his art. Born in New York in 1963, Michael's work is a synthesis of the 1970's Black Arts Movement in which he grew up and the multicultiralism prevalent in his formative years as a student and artist.

While Michael's work has employed culturally-loaded symbols such as hair, tar, feathers, rubber and mirrors, his primary medium was bronze. Often employing molds of his own body the sculptures provoke questions regarding the ways in which subtle signifiers affect our place within society. "The mirrors are a metaphorical device-a reflection of society and how we perceive ourselves through the eyes of others. The ways in which self-perception is molded through myths, stereotypes and subliminal messages," he told Marysol Nieves of the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Michael's life-sixe figurative sculptures set readymades of ancient and modern mythologies within a contemporary landscape. A ladder made of feathers, a chariot with a broken wheel, and a punctured forearm represent some of the icons in Michael's lexicon of imagery. In his sculptures as well as his drawings, the figure was positioned in a narrative that lent itself to layered readings. Veneciano, Curator of Richards' 1995-96 Artist-in-residence exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem, wrote in the exhibition catalogue: "His form of appropriation is more on the level of the conceptual, intersecting the visual; it is essentially symbolic. This is apparent in works such as Escape Plan 76 (Brer Plane in the Brier Patch) and The Great Black Airmen where cultural constructs from folklore to African-American history function as topical and categorical readymades from which the artist culls his subjects and juxtaposes them to elicit their hidden contradictions as well as their poignancy.

One cannot help but notice the eerie connection between the imagery in Richard's work and his tragic death. Though ever forward in his conceptual art practice, Michael found sustenance in the subjects of the past, most specifically the triumph and tragedy of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. A team of World War II air force pilots, as famous for their flying skills as they were infamous for their alma mater, where balck men were subjected to being live experiments on syphilis, the airmen represented a crucial space for dialogue and thought that Michael contiuously mined. he worked with the inexhaustible history of the Tuskegee airmen for almost the last ten years, including his most recent works.

Considered to be the most prolific artists to come through The Studio Museum A-I-R program, he was included in the prestigious Passages: Contemporary Art in Transition by Deidre Scott. That exhibition presented Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (1999), a seminal work in his series about the Tuskegee Airmen, where the artist's cast body in the uniform of the airman is pierced withmodel airplanes. St. Sebastian, the patron saint of soldiers and athletes because of his physical endurance, was martyered for protecting captured Christians he was supposed to imprison.

While Michael's untimely death is a grave tragedy to us all, his life and work will be preserved by museums and galleries, and treasured by friends, family and new viewers, and recorded in the history of American art for generations to come.

Christine Y. Kim, Assistant Curator
The Studio Museum in Harlam and
Franklin Sirmans, Independent curator and critic

September 18, 2001
(excerpt)

For more info on Michael Richard's work, go to the Studio Museum in Harlem website http://www.studiomuseuminharlem.org/richards.html

Michael also worked on "Choice Histories," an installation at Artists Space in 1992.
see: http://www.repohistory.org/work.html

NOTE: If you would like to contribute materials re: Michael's work to this site, please e-mail vidlounge@aol.com