Michael Richards: Untitled, from the Tuskegee Airmen Series,
1997 (installation). - Dates: date unknown, 2007 through March
2, 2008 - Collections: Contemporary Art Untitled, from the
Tuskegee Airmen Series, 1997 In his short life, the artist
Michael Richards often created work related to the struggles and
triumphs of African Americans. He spent nearly ten years, for
example, on a series of sculptures dedicated to the Tuskegee
Airmen, a group of black aviators—named for their base in
Tuskegee, Alabama—who during World War II became the first
African American military pilots in the history of the United
States. For this particular sculpture, as with others in the
series, Richards made a fiberglass mold of his own body and then
pierced the work with nails (other sculptures in the series are
impaled by toy airplanes). The sculpture thus refers both to
Christian iconography (St. Sebastian, depicted with a body full
of arrows) and to African objects known as nkisi nkondi (an
example of which, on view in the Museum’