NEW YORK, NY.- The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA North Miami) announced the release of
Michael Richards: Are You Down?, the first monograph dedicated to artist Michael Richards (1963–2001) and the visionary practice he developed during a prolific decade from 1990 to 2001.
Of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Richards was born in Brooklyn, raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and lived and worked between New York City and Miami. An integral member of a generation of Black artists that emerged in the 1990s, Richards produced sculptures, drawings, installations, and video work that gesture toward repression and reprieve and the possibilities of uplift and downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people.
“Though the issues which inform the work may be seen as primarily political, I use the language of metaphor to express them,” wrote Richards in an artist statement (ca. mid-1990s) which opens the book. “The use of feathers and tar, mirrors and ladders, the concept of flight both as freedom and surrender, all attempt to open a metaphorical space into which the viewer can be seduced. This space allows for an examination of the psychic conflict which results from the desire to both belong to and resist a society which denies blackness even as it affirms.”
Flight and aviation were central themes in his exploration of freedom and escape, evident in his engagement with the history of the Tuskegee Airmen, as well as narratives from Greek mythology, Christianity, and African and African American folklore. Tragically, Richards passed away on September 11, 2001, while working in his Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views studio in the World Trade Center. Yet Richards’s art and its concerns—Blackness, flight, diaspora, spirituality, police brutality, and the role of monuments—remain timely and prescient decades later.
The monograph features historic and contemporary documentation of Richards’s work alongside ephemera from his life and practice, and photographs of the artist and his family, friends, and collaborators. An indispensable resource on Michael Richards, the publication is amplified by a chorus of voices, including a significant scholarly text by editors Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin—curators and art historians who have been engaged in stewarding Richards’s legacy since 2016—as well as essays by acclaimed writer Edwidge Danticat and museum director and curator Franklin Sirmans; a personal reflection by Dawn Dale, the artist’s cousin and the caretaker of his art; and contributions from artists, curators, and scholars who knew Richards personally or have engaged closely with his work.
Co-published by the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, as a companion to the major touring retrospective of the same name, which originated at MOCA North Miami in 2021 and traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2023 and the Bronx Museum in 2023–24.
Edited by Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin
Essays by Dawn Dale, Edwidge Danticat, Alex Fialho, Melissa Levin, and Franklin Sirmans
Additional contributions by Genaro Ambrosino, Brooke Davis Anderson, Jonathan Calm, Jakeya Caruthers, william cordova, Michele Elam, Luis Gispert, Thelma Golden, Christine Y. Kim, Ken Landauer, Gean Moreno, Marysol Nieves, Ade Omotosho, Rose Salseda, Dread Scott, Sam Seawright, Lowery Stokes Sims, Carolyn Swiszcz, Jorge Daniel Torres de Veneciano, Wendell Walker, Luke Williams, Michèle M. Wong, and Lydia Yee
Designed by Miko McGinty and Rita Jules, Miko McGinty Inc.
Printed by Grafiche Veneziane, Italy
Specs
ISBN 978-1-954939-04-2 / 49.95 USD / Edition of 1,500 / Out November 11, 2025
Hardcover, 7 3⁄4 × 10 3⁄4 inches, 296 pages / 206 color ill., 20 b&w ill.
