Are You Down?

Michael Richards

Michael Richards: Are You Down? is the first monograph dedicated to the late Afro-Caribbean  artist Michael Richards. Of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Richards was born in Brooklyn in 1963, and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Integral to a generation of Black artists emerging in the 1990s, Richards’s artwork gestures toward both repression and reprieve from social injustices, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people. Flight and aviation were central themes for Richards as an exploration of freedom and escape, ascendance and descent, and manifested in his attention to the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen, Greek mythology, Christianity, and African and African American folklore. While Richards’s legacy is often eclipsed by the spectacular and seemingly prescient circumstances of his death–Richards was tragically  killed on 9/11 while working in his Lower Manhattan  Cultural Council (LMCC) World Views studio in the World Trade Center–this monograph, published on the occasion of the major touring retrospective exhibition Are You Down?, centers his life and work, attending to the historical and contemporary significance of his practice.

This fully illustrated monograph features contemporary and historic documentation of Richards’s work, ephemera from his life and practice, and photographs of the artist and his collaborators. An invaluable resource on the artist, the publication is amplified by a major critical essay by editors Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin, scholars and curators who have been engaged in stewarding the artist’s legacy since 2016, essays by acclaimed writer Edwidge Danticat and curator Franklin Sirmans, as well as an interview with the artist’s sister and Estate manager, Dawn Dale.