Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami opens retrospective of artist Michael Richard
Michael Richard, A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo, 1994. Installed at Château Shatto Gallery, overlooking Downtown Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Michael Richards Estate and Château Shatto.
MIAMI, FLA
.-The Museum of Contemporary, Art North Miami is presenting the exhibition Michael Richards: Are You Down? ― the first museum retrospective of the work of Michael Richards, exhibiting both his extensive sculpture and drawing practice.
Of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Michael Richards was born in Brooklyn in 1963, raised in Kingston, and came of age between post-independence Jamaica and post-civil rights era America. Richards used the language of metaphor to investigate racial inequity and the tension between assimilation and exclusion in his art. Flight and aviation were central themes for Richards as an exploration of freedom and escape, ascendance and descent. His artwork gestures towards both repression and reprieve from social injustices, and the simultaneous possibilities of uplift and downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people.