Swing Lo'

Michael was a extremely gifted, talented artist.

Michael made important work.

he was an artist who had a lot of courage.

The engaging with people, the talking and the discussion that he had with people was part of his work.

I mean.

Hey, Alex.

His work was breaking ground.

It was always a mission.

He was a vessel.

Always going somewhere.

There is almost no material in Michael Richards work that I can think of that doesn't have multiple meanings and references.

Michael created so much great work in a relatively short period of time that we have a legacy to build off of.

Each material that he uses.

There's tar, there's barbed wire.

Feathers, mirrors.

Each of them has both a racially charged meaning, sometimes referring to racist stereotypes.

Or also a poetic kind of meaning in society, a mirror reflecting you back while you're looking at the work.

Michael was predominantly a sculptor, but his work went across a lot of different materials.

When I think of Michael Richards practice, I think of a few things.

Of course, his interest in, in folklore, um, African American, Caribbean, Jamaican folklore narratives that come out of that.

I think about the influence of the Black arts movement from the 70s, when he sort of came of age as a young artist.

You know when when you think about the things that he was talking about in the time that he was talking about these issues, you know, that it was a very difficult time to talk about this.

We're from Caribbean family and everybody's always hard working.

They have a job.

Job.

Being an artist wasn't actually being considered being a job, so it's kind of different.

But Michael was serious about his craft and we had to take him seriously.

As a art school trained artist.

I can quote Renaissance, I can quote the Bible, but I won't do with it what you guys are doing with it.

I'm going to inflect it and fuse it with an understanding of what it means to be black in this country, and what this country has done with black people.

He talked about, you know, about double consciousness and which, you know, specifically, what does it mean to be black and American and have these warring ideals in one black body?

Glad to see you.

Yeah.

I'm headed off to Miami after this.

After the opening, after the opening.

For a while or.

For a while.

I have an artist in residence down there.

I should have already been there.

But what part of Miami is this?

Southeast.

Nice.

Very nice, president and all.

Congratulations again.

Doing it.

This is the third year.

Really?

Wow.

Yeah.

For the winter.

I first met Michael in November of 1997.

That first night we met Nina Ferrer, who was an art center artist, in the hallway with her door open, and Michael came out of his studio and joined us, and he was very gracious.

And we all talked and shared a lot of, um, common, common interests.

Um, my first impression of Michael was this very, uh, tall, gentle giant.

He had this way of talking that was so pleasant, and I don't know if he knew it, but he kind of seduces you when he talks to you.

He was smart.

He was funny.

And he was a great teacher to me in many, many areas that I didn't know.

So we started writing to each other and.

I asked him if he had, you know, sketches of the of the sculptures, and he said, well, I actually have a project that it's 100 drawings.

And those were the initial 100 of the escape plan 2000.

He started talking about a series of drawings he was doing.

He remembered that I did calligraphy, and as he was, I do.

I still do it.

I said not as much anymore.

And would I be interested in.

Because he was thinking of adding text to his drawings.

And I said, sure, okay.

And then that's how we started doing that.

He did this series of drawings.

Escape plan 1 to 12.

He was.

(Genaro) Mind boggling how people related to the work in their own personal way.

I think that, um, Michael's work was very much in tune with what was happening, but it was very genuine as well.

As a person of color.

The fact that you are often thinking about escape plans, you know, how do you escape?

(Dread) It's mostly, I think, this philosophical thing of like this, this place kills us and we need to flee.

Largely, it was a philosophical thing of trying to get to a world where you aren't constrained and confined by the racism that defines this world, and because you are black, actually can literally kill you.

(Lazaro) Well, I think he kind of started working in a bigger sense when he came here.

(Marisol) Michael was very happy during the time that he spent in Miami for his residency.

He clearly, um, had a community of artist friends and other, um, people involved in the art world, and he was enjoying that lifestyle very clearly.

(Lazaro) I think the influence of him being at the Art Center in Miami kind of like opened his eyes and his media to bigger things.

(Michael) A lot of my.

Work deals with issues of immigration and assimilation, black culture, um, and attraction repulsion to sort of larger society.

Um, and I use I've been traveling since I was a child.

I grew up in Jamaica, in the West Indies.

Um, and planes have always been a big part of my life.

Um, pilots in my work function as a symbol of, um, they're almost images of transcendence.

Um, they're these beings that go up into the sky, you know, the offer of freedom, of escape, of, you know, coming to a new land of, you know, the yellow brick road and success and all of that.

But you always come back down to the ground, you know, it's always, you know, maybe I'm Catholic, so maybe it's a little too religious, but, you know, always this descent, you know, from the high points back down to the ground and always a struggle of trying to transcend, to be high again.

(Melissa) We have envisioned this exhibition in four primary components.

So we have the sculptures.

Obviously, sculpture was the biggest body of work that Michael Richards created.

Then we have the drawings.

And then we have these installation images, which represent works that we couldn't represent physically in the exhibition.

And then we also have an area with a vitrine and remembrances to represent Michael Richards during his life and through friends, colleagues and peers who remember him.

I wouldn't be here without my art family, if you will.

And he was our family that bear my soul.

And he moved fluidly between spaces.

Social spaces, you know, artistic spaces.

The studio, the street, the museum, the gallery.

This is.

Madness.

Okay.

(Dawn) Michael was just good people.

So you were happy to be around him.

So that's why.

(Lazaro) He influenced a lot of the people that were around him.

He had such a flow with associating words and objects and the final product, even the way he gives names to his pieces.

It's funny, but it's serious and it's very subtle, but there's so many hidden little messages in there.

The first revelatory moment was seeing Tar Baby versus Saint Sebastian standing there.

Like, I got chills right now.

So I remember seeing Tar Baby versus Saint Sebastian for the first time, and it was the first time I had seen one of his full body casts, which was impressive, and it was a very moving piece.

He's dressed up as a Tuskegee Airman, and there are these planes flying in.

I mean, that one is haunting.

(Christine) He had great interest in the Tuskegee Airmen and the complexities of the story of the Tuskegee Airmen.

I think his interest in the Tuskegee Airmen, who were African-American heroes, World War two, they come back to the US.

One would think that they would be honored as heroes upon their return.

But of course, that did not happen.

Listen, yesterday I fulfilled one of my ambitions as a combat pilot.

I got one airplane and an American far from home fighting a war around the world.

Listen again to my leader.

And the second shot was me.

And two focke-wulfs came on my right.

I turned right and put up a stone wall of bullets.

And the first a wall of bullets.

It wasn't so long ago these men were students in a university.

Workmen in a shipyard.

(Genaro) He had explained everything about the tower, what it meant in American, you know, history, which to me was.

Scary.

Like really.

Troubling.

But, you know, it was what his message was.

And then, you know, as a good Catholic are.

I knew of the story of San Sebastian and.

And all that.

The plane's piercing the body.

The figure of the Tuskegee Airmen in Saint Sebastian is referencing, of course, Saint Sebastian the Martyr.

And so he understood that he knew that it was his first.

His first approach to it.

(Luis) Michael's work, you'd walk in and you see a piece, and it would hit you on the gut, and then you sit there with it, and then it's then you start to peel off all the layers of the onion.

And Michael had that.

When Michael told me that he got a studio and he was moving back to New York City, and then he told me, it's going to be at the Twin Towers, I thought it was very odd for me to a studio in an office building.

How will that work?

The first thing that came into my head was like, how is he going to keep it clean?

How is he going to go up there?

And they're going to notice that he's making all these things came into my head, but I thought it was so odd.

And he said, yeah, but it's free.

They're offering it to me.

I'm like, all right.

(William) We drove to New York to drop off works.

We stayed there for about a week.

There was a drawing.

It looked like the images that one saw from the towers.

(Genaro) The whole thing was very, very peculiar, to say the least.

That day I happened to be at a clinic where they had the television on.

Had I not been in that clinic, I would have never seen the actual thing happening live.

(William) Got to Miami on the 11th.

In the morning, I think around five in the morning.

(Genaro) I was supposed to go with William to Michael's studio.

The day before.

The night before.

But I couldn't do it because I had to go pick up all these things.

And that's why I didn't see Michael on the ninth.

He was working on a second version of Tar Baby, that he had done all these drawings and sculptures, and he was so excited about the new work and that he was going to stay there.

(William) I went to sleep and my roommate woke me up.

And he said, they're gone, they're gone.

I said, what are you talking about?

(Charo) And I remember screaming at things, you know, like, go run, you know, because you could see that these things were going to fall.

(William) So I went outside.

There was a TV in the living room already on, and I said, what are you talking?

What's gone?

He goes, they're gone.

The buildings are gone.

And the towers were right.

There he goes.

No.

That's old.

So I didn't understand what he was saying.

And then they showed a current image, and all there was is smoke.

So merely ran into my room, grabbed my cell phone, called Michael, and there was no, no connection at all.

(Genaro) I said, what's happening?

You don't know?

They they hit the first tower and we thought that it was a bomb.

And now they hit the second tower.

When he said that.

You know, I thought to myself.

No, it's all right.

It's late.

Michael must have left.

You know, he had to be at the museum at 9:00 in the morning.

He can.

He could not possibly be there.

Get out.

(Marysol) Apparently Michael had spent the night there.

He had really gotten so excited working in his studio that he had decided to spend the night because it got late and he was tired.

And we didn't know this initially.

But slowly, his friends who were, um, who shared studio space with him sort of filled in a lot of those missing.

Seeing gaps.

Was such a strange at time.

(Genaro) Then I knew that nobody had heard from him and it was not a good sign.

(Christine) Where's Michael?

Um, and I think a couple of days later was when we realized that no one had seen him or talked to him.

(Franklin) For me to think back to that day.

It affects all of us.

Setting up an ad hoc to have known somebody that perished in that way, who you were that close to in the form of Michael made it even, you know, more tragic in many ways.

(Charo) And it wasn't just some random person that it happened to.

It was someone that you knew that you, you know, you admire, that you loved.

In many ways, when you think about the way he died, this airman had these airplanes encrusted on him the same way that they did to the towers.

Yeah.

There he is.

Michael.

Oh.

Man.

You can't not think about the prophecy of it.

You know, the fact that there was a connection, a deep connection between him, his work in that moment, for that to happen to him was incredibly painful.

It is painful still today when you think about it.

Oops.

Otherwise.

(Dawn) Michael's father.

I guess he didn't understand Michael wanting to be an artist, because we're from a Caribbean family and everybody has 50 jobs.

He had a storage space with all his stuff.

(Dawn) So we have to go and get his stuff out of storage.

So okay, we go down and I look and I was like, okay.

So Uncle Fred said, what are we going to do?

And we got to get rid of this.

And I said, no, if we can't get rid of it.

He said, then what do you want to do with it?

I said, well, I can hold on to it.

And he said, okay, you take care of it.

And that was it.

He said, take care of it, and I didn't know where to put it.

So I said, the safest place for it for now will be at my house, in my garage.

You can't get rid of a man's work, especially his life's work.

The garage was the only place that everything could fit.

And that's where they stayed.

You were just there.

Uncle Fred.

Literally, he would have thrown it out.

Not out of malice or being mean, but he would have no use for it.

And I don't think Uncle Fred, even though he supported Mike, he I don't think he understood the value of somebody's work.

And he just figured, you know what?

He's not here anymore, so I'm going to dump his stuff and that it would have gotten dumped.

That's what would have happened to Michael's work.

I didn't know what was going to come of it.

If anything was ever going to come of it, I probably would have been an old woman with his stuff still in my garage, but I just didn't have it in my heart to get rid of it.

I'm really happy that I held on to everything.

Michael's career started, to our knowledge, in the works in early 90s thinking through large scale installations.

So they have a range of references, from the Middle Passage and the transatlantic slave trade to minstrel performance and blackface.

(Genaro) I was very happy to receive the initial phone call from actually Melissa and Alex about this, you know.

Show that they were planning on doing a Michael because they had seen the work and they thought that it needed to be rescued from from oblivion.

And, um, they asked me if, you know, if I had something that I could contribute images or information or news.

So I gave them everything that I, that I had at the time.

But I didn't think that.

You know it was going to happen.

The way it happened.

But they really worked their butts off.

And they put together a really beautiful exhibition in New York that was very praised.

(Melissa) Something interesting about the way that Michael pursued his practice is that he relied heavily on institutional support from museums and nonprofits, so he participated in numerous artist residency programs.

(Alex) And we didn't know Michael personally.

But in the process of curating the exhibition, we've talked to upwards of 50 or more people who knew Michael, people who worked with him, curators, friends, and from them.

We've learned so much about the process of his making work, what he was invested in as an artist, the issues he thought were central to his life and his art.

We really try to keep michael's voice at the center of the exhibition.

People talk about the art and the importance of the art, but just as often people talk about him as a friend.

He really comes through in the exhibition.

We try to have it both serve as a memory and a celebration of his life, alongside a celebration of his art.

(Dread) Michael was one of the best artists I've ever met.

He was really amazing.

And it's a real loss that he he died so young because the artwork is brilliant.

I'm really happy that that that work is getting the attention that it it really richly deserves.

(Charo) He was a beautiful friend.

He was a very, very, um, talented artist who had a lot of courage.

(Lazaro) He was not afraid.

That was the message that he wanted to convey.

And it was there.

I hope he's left a little spark in all of us that knew him, and I hope that the art that's still out there.

I'm really inspires people.

(William) His work was breaking grounds and taking stands.

The one thing that I miss most about Michael is Michael.

(Franklin) Michael should be remembered as a great artist, but also as a great human being, somebody who gave way more than they took and believed in art to the fullest.

I'm a waste, this waste.

(Dread) The artwork is brilliant.

A younger generation of artists is now thinking about blackness.

Black bodies, escape, oppression, colonialism.

Those are all things that Michael was exploring, you know, 25 years ago, I think is really important.

And so I'm glad that he's being written into art history.

His work should be included in celebrated and known about.

All smiles on the.

Clear blue sky.

We drive straight as an arrow flies.

No where to be.

No dreams to chase.

Tonight.

We've got time to wait.

(Michael) Let's do a tour.

(Michael) Okay, here we have the best piece in the show.

Come on.

Okay.

(Michael) Let's talk about this piece.

This is the ass of this piece.

I was looking at that.

That's not my fun.