Attempting Escape

Abstract

Abstract The artwork of sculptor, draftsperson, and installation artist Michael Richards (1963 – 2001) challenges prevalent assumptions about the physical properties, and therefore the aesthetic application, of suspension in Black cultural production. As an African American of Jamaican and Costa Rican descent, Richards grappled with questions of citizenship, racism, and freedom, frequently using motifs of flight and gravity. Although Richards created his work before his untimely death in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, his piece titled Tar and Feather nevertheless anticipates the possibilities, and important limitations, of suspension as a theoretical framework. When placed in conversation with the theoretical discourse that now exists surrounding suspension, Richards's material sculptures and archival sketches posthumously anticipate the limits of conventional strategies for Black possibility. This paper argues that Tar and Feather illustrates the asymptotic imbrication of blackness and freedom, which renders the plot as both a diagram of forces and an abstract aesthetic geography from which to create.