Book Review: Michael Richards: Are You Down?
Words by Amanda Keeley
Michael Richards: Are Your Down?
Photo by Amanda Keeley
A newspaper clipping taped to Michael Richards’s 1997 datebook reads: “The trouble with history is that it implies that what happened in the past isn’t happening now.” It could serve as an epigraph for “Michael Richards: Are You Down?,” published to accompany the retrospective that originated at MOCA North Miami in 2021.
Richards’s work gets under my skin. His figures stay with me, and this publication brought me closer to the person behind them. Sculptures, installations, videos, and drawings appear alongside notebook pages, archival materials, and recollections. Essays by Edwidge Danticat, Franklin Sirmans, and editors Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin, explore the contradictions running through his practice: the desire to belong and the necessity of resistance; flight as freedom and escape as an elusive promise.
I was particularly drawn to Richards’s connection to Miami, where he held residencies at ArtCenter/South Florida (now Oolite Arts) between 1997 and 2000. The remembrances offer a sense of his presence within this creative community, bringing warmth and intimacy to the book. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Richards explored flight, migration, and transcendence. He repeatedly returned to the Tuskegee Airmen, Black military pilots who served a country that continued to segregate them. Casting his own body, he gave these tensions physical form. His figures carry history’s weight even as they imagine release. His “Escape Plan” series pairs carefully rendered drawings with wry, poetic texts proposing improbable routes to freedom. Humor and racial stereotypes complicate these imagined escapes. Alongside the finished works, notebook sketches offer glimpses of ideas taking shape. Richards died in the September 11 attacks at thirty-eight. His cousin Dawn Dale preserved his work, making this exhibition and publication possible. This is legacy stewardship at its best. It makes me wonder how many other artists remain underrecognized.
Reading this book, I kept returning to the clipping in his datebook. His questions about Blackness, exclusion, and belonging remain painfully present.
Michael Richards: Are You Down?
Edited by Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin
CARA/MOCA North Miami, 2025
296 pages, hardcover, $49.95
Available for purchase at Books & Books and MOCA North Miami