Michael Richards: Are You Down? is 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. Flight and aviation are 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.

Published on the occasion of the major touring retrospective Michael Richards: Are You Down?, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in 2021, this richly illustrated monograph attends to the ongoing significance of his practice.

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’s life and work, 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.

With essays by Dawn Dale, Edwidge Danticat, Franklin Sirmans, and editors Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin.

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.