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 towar
“When I was young I wanted to be a policeman,” reads the inscription under a bust of a man’s head and neck. Look closer at the face of the bust, and the images of police officers in full riot gear, weapons raised, come into view.
Now, take in the third bust in this row of five. Like a bullet wound between the eyes or a sight seared into one’s memory, the image of Rodney King’s swollen, beaten face is photo-transferred onto the figure’s forehead. The entire head and neck rotate endlessly never pausing, never resting on a motorized metal arm affixed to a pedestal that reads, “A loss of faith brings vertigo.”
“When I was young I wanted to be a policeman,” reads the inscription under a bust of a man’s head and neck. Look closer at the face of the bust, and the images of police officers in full riot gear, weapons raised, come into view.
Now, take in the third bust in this row of five. Like a bullet wound between the eyes or a sight seared into one’s memory, the image of Rodney King’s swollen, beaten face is photo-transferred onto the figure s forehead. The entire head and neck rotate endlessly never pausing, never resting on a motorized metal arm affixed to a pedestal that reads, “A loss of faith brings vertigo.”
de facto)
prohibition of teaching both reading and writing to its enslaved population (called ‘Black’) was both ubiquitous and fatally enforced. This inhumane (and racist) practice resulted in many unwritten stories and silenced voices of the enslaved African population. African-American fiction fiction written by African-American writers provides an intellectual landscape to understand their interior life in the context of their external world and in defiance of the efforts by the white population to erase Black voices and Black stories. It is the work of writers like Toni Morrison that has given us another chance to reimagine and retain their world the world of ancestors who lived, laughed, loved, died, suffered, and survived so that we could be here.