“Tar Baby vs. St Sebastian”

Sculpture, 1999

Michael Richards

Michael Richards, artist: born New York  August, 2 1963; died New York September, 11  2001.

Michael Richards was probably working in his studio on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Centre north tower on the morning of 11 September. According to a colleague Richards’s last two sculptures were bronze versions of himself pierced by airplanes and accompanied by meteors and flames.

For the last 10 years he had worked repeatedly with imagery of flight, including feathers, wings and plane parts. The work for which the 38-year-old artist will surely be best remembered was entitled Tar Baby vs St Sebastian, a bronze sculpture made in 1999 consisting of his own life-size body pierced by model planes rather than arrows.

This bizarre congruity between Richards’s art and the direct manner of his death might seem typical of that odd semi-psychic ability known to artists. Christine Y. Kim, Assistant Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, acknowledged, “We had scheduled that I would see his new work [that week]. His creations often dealt with technology such as aviation, ironically.” But it should also be noted that Richards would have applied for this “studio-in-the-sky” specifically because of his interest in flight and aviation.

He was extremely happy with this new, raw studio space granted to him as one of the 15 artists in the “World Views” programme run by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. The LMCC was started 30 years ago and ran the World Trade Center Studio Program to take advantage of the small pockets of empty space always available in these mammoth buildings.

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council offices at 5 World Trade Centre were destroyed but Liz Thompson, its Executive Director, found time to honour Richards, the only artist to have died in the events: “We think he worked late into the night. He was so promising. He was on a tear.”

Richards would often spend the night in his studio rather than embark on the lengthy commute back to his home in Queens. “He would work through most of the night and into the morning,” said Kira Harris, a close friend. According to a studio neighbour Richards had cooked dinner, watched the Monday-night football and at midnight was still working on his sculpture. Thus “See you later” are his last known words.

This sculpture is currently at the North Carolina Museum of art, everytime I go I get really emotional when I see this….not only because of the way he died but that more people didnt know about him and it was only through is death that I found out about him many years ago..

Pay attention to artist when they are alive.

(via auntada)