The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 3

Dreams come in the wilderness of night
Where angels commune with silence
Michael Rolando Richards was a Jamaican-American sculptor whose works
frequently explored African American themes. Born in Jamaica, Richards
earned his master's at New York University. He was an artist-in-residence at
the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1996 and showed his work there in
"Passages" in 1999. Richards' 1999 sculpture Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian, was
cast from his own body and resembles a Tuskegee Airman whose body is
being pierced by airplane, reminiscent of iconography for St. Sebastian. Today
the piece is in the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art. Richards
died, aged 38, in the World Trade Centre in the September 11 attacks.(1)
An artist builds an icon of a pilot. He is remembering history, he is
foretasting his own death. He sees the figure of the death of Saint Sebastian
as the prefiguring model of a outline for our time for all time, yet he follows
his own inclinations.
ephemera of wings, and a gold paint spilt
the cardboard outlines conforming to a blueprint
wrinkled on tissue purpled with
the outlines of...
what? a dream come true? a tar blurred view
an adjustable happenstance seen through
a something wept for years, and not yet done,
oh tears of tar
the half flown years in dun;(2)
The image is a reality he had experienced and will experience again. He
knows all, he foresees all in the exhilarating moment of creation. He is
absolute in his convictions. The pilot stands naked to the barbaric forces of
history and history will survive him. He is the essential witness who as the
essayist says:
"Science is embarrassed by what it can’t explain…it falls off a cliff. Faced
with Michael Richards’s prophetic depiction of his own death, it can do little
more than mumble, 'It was a random thing, the clicking-past of numbers…the
shrapnel of blind fate.' This work and the death of Michael Richards are a
manifestation of a realm we are now for the most part closed off from, a realm
not taken seriously (if it is even acknowledged by a modern to exist.) It is
occult, a mystery we cannot penetrate. We cannot make our way into it with
stethoscopes and rubble-sniffing dogs." (3)