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Michael Ronaldo Richards (August 2, 1963 – September 11, 2001) was a famous artist and sculptor. He used his art as a means of self expression and to showcase the African American experience. "Deeply influenced by the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, Richards delved into African American history and folklore for images that would expose the contradictions of American society. Richards worked primarily in bronze".

LIFE
Michael Richards was born in Brookland, NY in 1963, and was raised in Kingston, Jamaica. He attended Excelsior High School, graduating with honors, then moved back to the United States to attend Queens College, where he earned his BA, and later received his MA from New York University in 1985. After he completed his education he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, soon after he gained a prestigious artist’s residency in the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He is best known for his sculptures which depict the struggles of living in America as an African-American. Richards was passionate about representing the lives of Black men throughout various parts and stages of American culture. Most of his serves to depict this overarching theme, and follows a similar historical story line.

CAREER
One of his better known sculptures, titled “Are You Down,” is displayed in Franconia Sculpture Park, in Franconia, Maine. Three parachuters are displayed as having already landed on the ground. Between the men, who are cast almost to life-sized scale, is a target that they only slightly missed while landing. They appear sullen as they are sitting in tar, eyes gazing towards the ground. The men are dressed in aviator uniforms, torn from the fall. They are sculpted in honor of the all-black three man Tuskegee Airmen’s Squadron of WWII. Franconia Sculpture Park plans to have this piece by Richard’s cast in bronze, making it the only permanent installation at the park. In 2000, for one of the of the many fellowships received during his career, he was commissioned by the Franconia Sculpture Park/Jerome Fellowship and sculpted “Are You Still Down” which is still displayed in the park as well, it has been preserved as a tribute to Richards.

The piece Richards is best known for is titled “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian.” Again, a Tuskegee Airman is depicted. In this particular sculpture, the airmen is being punctured by multiple planes, standing pierced and wounded, palms facing up. The man stands at 7 feet tall, and is constructed out of resin and steel. The imagery is based on St. Sebastian, a Christian martyr. It was the early St. Sebastian's duty to capture and imprison Christians but he instead, offered them protection. He was murdered by being shot by multiple arrows for his offenses. Many believe that this work was based upon the artist himself and sculpted to resemble his own image, foreshadowing what would later be his early and unforeseeable passing.

Reoccurring themes in Michael Richards’ art include planes and other references to aviation. They symbolize the struggle that African American's have had and continue to face. The planes specifically work to represent reprieve from racial tension, oppression, and inequality. Michael Richards’ death in his art studio in the World Trade Center during the attacks on September 11, 2001, make these recurring images especially impactful in his art today, and has the potential to give it an even more meaningful message. Before his death, Richards was part of a roster of rising African American artists.

PROMINENT PIECES
“Let Me Entertain You” (1993) is a piece that Richards designed and created to tell the story of being a Black man. He did this by using light boxes, and pinning pieces of “black skin” to them. It is now part of a mixed media installation that uses other pieces to bring light to his original message. Another popular piece is “A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo” (1994), which is made up of five plaster heads. These heads are placed on pedestals and then newspaper images of police are transferred onto the surface of each. The original cause that this piece was created to draw attention to was the beating of Rodney King. This was the beating of a Black man in 1991 by the Los Angeles police department. This is a piece that served to convey a strong message then, and its meaning holds truer now. 1996 was the first year that the imagery of the airplane was first seen in Richards’ work. “Escape Plan 76 (Brer Plane in the Brier Patch)” was a sculpture of five planes wrapped in barbed wire. Each was presented alongside a narrative from a folklore story that related its moral to the current racial politics at the time. He related this to the story of Br'er Fox in a way that compares Br'er Fox trying to kill Br'er Rabbit, but Br'er Rabbit knowing how to escape because he grew up there and knows the difficulties, to the life that African American people are living in America. He also related it back to planes by saying “Planes and other vehicles of escape are always caught in traps or crashed, abandoned signs of hope and promise.” A piece of work that was outside of his normal medium of work was “A view of Heaven...after” which he used colored pencils to draw sometime in the 1900s. It is another piece that mirrors his death. It depicts buildings ablaze with smoke billowing out of them that look like the Twin Towers on 9/11. People argue that this piece is specifically prophetic, as it so closely depicts his death.

LEGACY
Later in his career, he became an Oolite Arts alumnus, where his legacy is honored still today with the Michael Richards Award. An artist is recognized annually as the recipient of this award and is commissioned to create a piece that is displayed at their campus and also receives $75,000. Richards was the recipient of the “Studio in the Sky” fellowship, where he was awarded his studio in the World Trade Center by the Lower Manhattan Art Council. He had spent the night in this studio the night before his unfortunate death, thus was working in the studio on September 11, 2001 when the hijacked plane crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. The Michael Richards exhibit is on Governors Island, it celebrates his life and work. The exhibition portrays the work of an artist whose life was lost tragically and suddenly. His work, like the “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian”, was held in his exhibit on Governors Island. This exhibit holds work that hasn’t been seen for the 15 years after his death, and some of it had never been seen before. Richard was private in many aspects and stores a great deal of his art in cardboard boxes in family members' homes. If Richards life were not to have been untimely cut short, it is believed that he would have been a strong force in the narrative of African American artists.