and michael richards Michael Richards: Are You Down? Takes Flight

melissa levin and alex fialho Exhibition Guest Curators

Michael Richards’s visionary artworks, created between 1990 and 2001, engage Blackness, flight, diaspora, spirituality, police brutality, and monuments in this exhibition, his largest museum retrospective to date. It is especially significant to display Michael Richards: Are You Down? at the NCMA because one of the two versions of his 1999 sculpture Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian has been on long-term loan here for two decades, since the exhibition Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight in 2003.

Acknowledging the power and prescience of Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian in light of Richards’s passing on September 11, we also hope to provide visitors with additional context for the sculpture. The exhibition centers discussion of the work in terms of the artist’s engagement with the African and African American folktales of Brer Rabbit, the early Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, and the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American pilots in US military history.

Richards’s artwork elicits an abundant range of responses— from the visceral to the scholarly—including meditation, confrontation, winks and nods, analysis, and reflection. Indeed, there is always more to see, more to say, more that is waiting to be written. Michael Richards: Are You Down? offers an opportunity to expand understandings of his artistic practice by displaying the full breadth of his wide-ranging work across sculpture, drawing, installation, and video. We hope this retrospective inspires continued conversations, scholarship, and engagement around Michael Richards’s art, life, and legacy.

Michael Richards: Are You Down? is open now through July 23.

Michael Richards: Are You Down? is co-curated by Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin, and organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. The exhibition is made possible with lead support from Oolite Arts and major support from the Wege Foundation. We are grateful to the Green Family Foundation and Funding Arts Network. Thanks to Brooke Davis Anderson; Roberta Denning; V. Joy Simmons, MD; Miami MoCAAD; and John Shubin for their generosity. Special thanks to Michael Richards’s cousin and steward of his estate, Dawn Dale.

For nearly three decades, American artist Karen LaMonte (b. 1967) has crafted remarkable artworks in glass, iron, and bronze. Earlier this year the NCMA was gifted her Semi-Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery by Lisa Shaffer Anderson and Dudley Buist Anderson. An enigmatic piece, it encapsulates LaMonte’s triumph as a sculptor of glass while also pinpointing the artist’s concern with eroticism and gender.

LaMonte initially studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design but switched to glass. “One of the things that appealed to me ... was it was almost like a mysterious material, and it seemed like you were a magician when you were working with it,” she recalls, “it really captured my imagination.” After creating small-scale marionette sculptures, LaMonte realized she was “actually interested in the body of the puppet and not really in the head or rest of the puppet.”

After only a year in Prague, LaMonte began a series of life-size glass cast dresses, including Semi-Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery. Inspired by subtle eroticism that’s heightened by garment design, the glass works appear to fold, hang, and ultimately emphasize the curvature of absent bodies. “I use the absent nude cloaked in transparent glass dresses to investigate the tension between humanism and eroticism,” LaMonte explains, “the physical and the ethereal, the body and the spirit.”

LaMonte’s sculptures have previously been compared to baroque statues of the 17th century, especially those of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). Like them, LaMonte has employed drapery to stress and accentuate the bends and twists of bodies. Unlike their sculptures, however, her works are a concentrated study of femininity and a haunting critique of the reclining nude female figure—an image that’s appeared in the history of West-

Jared Ledesma joined the Museum as curator of 20th-century art and contemporary art in August 2022. In this position he works to strengthen the 20th-century and contemporary art collections, exhibitions, and outdoor projects. With assistant curator Maya Brooks, he also oversees the exhibition program for NCMA-affiliate Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA).

Ledesma comes to us from the Akron Art Museum, where he led its curatorial department as senior curator. As an associate curator at the Des Moines Art Center, he organized the exhibitions Manos: Latin American Art from the Des Moines Art Center's Collections; Queer Abstraction; Hedda Sterne: Imagination and Machine; and

“In my work I pursue the elevation of all artistic voices and aim to uncover lesser-known narratives, stemming from my identity as a member of the LGBTQ and Latinx communities,” says Ledesma. “I am thrilled to apply this perspective toward creating inviting art exhibitions and programming at the NCMA and furthering the bold exhibition history of SECCA.”