Michael Richards: Are You Down?: Chicago book event

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sculpture Department are proud to host a celebration of Michael Richards: Are You Down?—the first monograph of the late artist Michael Richards (1963–2001). Artist william cordova (SAIC BFA '96) joins authors and curators Melissa Levin and Alex Fialho to discuss Richards’ work moderated by artist and Assistant Professor of Sculpture Nyeema Morgan. This event is open to the SAIC community as well as the general public. Please RSVP here by Monday, April 13, at noon.

The monograph, co-published in 2025 by the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, features Richards's visionary practice developed during a prolific decade from 1990 to 2001. Of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Richards was born in Brooklyn, raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and lived and worked between New York City and Miami. An integral member of a generation of Black artists that emerged in the 1990s, Richards produced sculptures, drawings, installations, and video work that gesture toward repression and reprieve and the possibilities of uplift and downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people. Richards passed away on September 11th, 2001 as he was working in his studio in the World Trade Center, which hosted the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's artist residency. Yet Richards’s art and its concerns—Blackness, flight, diaspora, spirituality, police brutality, and the role of monuments—remain timely and prescient decades later.