"Icarus Wings 'n' Things": Michael Richards and Myth

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• "Icarus Wings 'n' Things":Michael Richards and Myth^*
• Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin

I think history has always been important to me because if you examine the past you can also read the symptoms of what is prevalent now in terms of racial associations and the relationships of power present in our society today. History is interesting in terms of how we mythologize it, how we accept history or interpretations of history as fact, and whose interpretation it is. In many ways my history is so different from the official white versions.¹

—Michael Richards, 1997

spanning the decade between 1990 and 2000, artist Michael Richards created a prolific body of work including sculpture, drawing, installation, and video.

Integral to a generation of Black artists emerging in the 1990s, Richards—who was of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage—engaged themes of flight, diaspora, Blackness, spirituality, police brutality, monuments, and more. Among the abundant references throughout his body of work, Richards frequently alluded to Greek mythology. Icarus looms largest, with evocations overt and subtle, thematic and visual, literal and metaphoric. Other related narratives, including those of Daedalus, Sisyphus, Medusa, and Hermes also appear. As scholar Patrice Rankine, who invited this contribution, wrote of Richards's engagement with Icarus, it illustrates "the movement of the symbolic [End Page 251]

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Michael Richards with Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian, 1999. Photograph by Frank Stewart.

form, its adaptability to new contexts, and some possible affinities with Black vernacular traditions."² Indeed, Richards's work gestures toward both repression and reprieve from social injustices, and the simultaneous (Icarian) possibilities of uplift and downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people.

Though we are only aware of Richards explicitly naming Icarus once in an artwork, he makes his way to Icarian themes through images of flight and aviation. Many of Richards's works display flight's capacity for metaphor and contradiction; he wrote that he viewed "the concept of flight as both freedom [End Page 252] and surrender."³ In this context, Richards's artist statement offers an exploration of dualities that can be related to Icarian complexities; the statement reads, in part: "By focusing on issues of identity and identification, I attempt to examine the feelings of doubt and discomfort which face blacks who wish to succeed in a system which is structured to deny them access. How do systems of representation, and the portrayal of success both seduce and repel? I wish primarily to give voice to the psychic spaces in which exist both hope and frustration, faith and failure, and the compromises which must be negotiated in order to survive."⁴

Importantly, in his multifaceted work featuring flight and wings, Richards also invokes the Tuskegee Airmen, global indigenous piercing practices, Congolese nkisi nkondi power figures, Catholicism, and African and African American folklore, among other references. As cultural critic Greg Tate foretold in his influential 1986 essay for the Village Voice, "Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke," "Though nobody's sent out any announcements yet, the '80s are witnessing the maturation of a postnationalist black arts movement, one more Afrocentric and cosmopolitan than anything that's come before … The point is that the present generation of black artists is cross-breeding aesthetic references like nobody is even talking about yet."⁵ Enacting Tate's observations, Richards synthesized these references in his artworks, bringing together spirituality and history with popular culture to combine, recast, and reimagine the themes of his practice.

This issue's proposed intention—to be a "catalyst for transformative ideas regarding the reality of race and racism within all aspects of Greek and Roman Studies" and to do so by seeking to be expansive in its call for responses—resonates with Richards's oeuvre.⁶ As a friend and studio mate Sam Seawright recalled, "I remember Michael would often be in the studio for days and nights on end furiously working on a project, casting hands, feet, faces and arms … I remember finding these fragments scattered around the studio like archeological relics left by an ancient, advanced civilization."⁷ From our perspective as art historians of Modern and Contemporary...