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)