Michael Richards’s Free F’All Returns for 9/11’s 25th Anniversary

The Brooklyn Museum has returned Michael Richards’s 1997 sculpture Free F’All to public view on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The timing gives the work unavoidable memorial force, but its pilot, parachute, and pierced body were conceived four years before Richards died and must first be read through the Black aviation history he chose.

 
 

Why the Brooklyn Museum Brought Free F’All Back

The installation opens September 11, 2026, in the Brooklyn Museum lobby and is scheduled to remain there through June 6, 2027. A season preview published by Time Out on August 26 gave those dates and identified the lobby as the site. That distinguishes the date of the announcement from the date the presentation opened.

Rhea Nayyar’s September 10 on-site report for Hyperallergic says Free F’All is the museum’s only work by Richards. Nayyar also identifies Kimberli Gant, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, as the organizer and reports that she sees the display as a way for Richards’s legacy to continue through the work.

The lobby placement is more than logistics. It makes a collection object into a threshold encounter, placing Richards’s figure in the path of visitors who did not arrive for a retrospective. That is a consequential curatorial choice: the museum has made one sculpture carry both an account of Black military service and a commemoration of the artist without changing the object’s date or original subject.

Infographic by Art in Context, based on National Park Service, U.S. Air Force, Hyperallergic, The Bronx Museum.

 
 

Read the Pilot Before Reading It as Prophecy

Made from fiberglass and resin with a rust-oxide surface, Free F’All presents a Black military pilot with closed eyes. He wears an aviator’s cap and a parachute pack. His arms stay close to his sides, one knee bends slightly, and nails puncture the figure from the collarbone through the torso and limbs, including the hands and feet.

Those details resist the conventional posture of a military monument. The pilot does not scan the horizon, salute, or control an aircraft. The parachute pack suggests rescue, but the original installation’s 16-foot perch and bucket below made a safe descent look impossible. Read together, the equipment of rescue and the immobilized pose make flight neither simple liberation nor certain catastrophe.

Because this is three-dimensional art, the contradiction changes as viewers move around it. From the front, the body has the stillness of an icon; from the side, the protruding nails turn its surface into a field of physical threat. Hyperallergic compares the punctured hands and feet with crucifixion and reads the nails as the discrimination and violence endured by the Black pilots Richards honored.

That is not the only framework Richards built into the figure. The Bronx Museum’s institutional account of his practice places flight beside Christianity, Greek myth, and African and African American folklore. It also records that Richards repeatedly cast his own body for figures that could appear as pilots, saints, or both. The likeness therefore joins history to self-portraiture: the body bearing the pilot’s uniform is also the artist’s body.

The work can now feel prophetic because of Richards’s death in an aviation attack. But “prophetic” is a description imposed by hindsight, not its original subject. The sculpture’s 1997 date is the safeguard against collapsing its meanings into September 11. Its tension between ascent and descent already belonged to Richards’s sustained investigation of Black mobility, vulnerability, and the cost of attempted transcendence.

The Brooklyn Museum entrance, photographed by ajay_suresh and hosted by Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic; cropped.

 
 

The Tuskegee Airmen Were Not a 1941 U.S. Air Force Unit

The historical referent sharpens that tension. The National Park Service describes the Tuskegee program as an Army Air Corps effort conducted under segregated policies and says its first pilot class began training on July 19, 1941. The name also encompasses far more than pilots: the NPS counts more than 16,000 participants, including mechanics, instructors, navigators, radio technicians, weather forecasters, and other personnel.

Wallpaper* calls the Tuskegee Airmen “the US Air Force’s first Black unit” and says it was formed in 1941 in its September exhibition guide. That collapses institutional lineage. The U.S. Air Force itself dates its creation as a separate branch to September 18, 1947. The careful description is that the Tuskegee program belonged to the Army’s air arm, a predecessor in the present-day Air Force’s lineage.

The point is not pedantry. Richards’s sculpture engages the contradiction of serving a country that segregated the people doing the service. The pilot is honored, but not smoothed into uncomplicated heroism. The nails, closed eyes, and parachute keep valor, injury, danger, and possible escape in the same figure.

Tuskegee Airmen photographed by Toni Frissell. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain. This version has been digitally restored.

 
 

From a 1997 Work to a 2021–24 Retrospective

Richards was born in Brooklyn in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. He moved back to the United States to attend Queens College, where he earned a BA in 1985, and received an MA from New York University in 1991. The Bronx Museum records that he joined its Artists in the Marketplace program in 1994 and had a two-person show with Cathleen Lewis there in 1997, the year Free F’All was made.

On September 11, 2001, Richards was working in a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views studio on the 92nd floor of World Trade Center Tower One when the first plane struck. LMCC’s own record confirms the place and circumstances. Richards was 38.

The anniversary display is not a rediscovery from nowhere. Curators Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin began mounting exhibitions devoted to Richards’s art and legacy in 2016. MOCA North Miami organized his first museum retrospective in 2021, marking the 20th anniversary of September 11 with sculpture, drawing, installation, and video from the decade between 1990 and 2001. The retrospective traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2023 and the Bronx Museum for a run that ended in January 2024.

The Brooklyn presentation is therefore the latest stage of a sustained institutional reassessment. It narrows a career survey to the museum’s single Richards holding and moves that object into a high-traffic threshold space. Where the retrospective reconstructed a body of work, the lobby installation asks one figure to hold the artist’s larger vocabulary of flight, Black history, spirituality, violence, and attempted transcendence.

 

Tuskegee Airmen at Ramitelli, Italy, March 1945. Photograph by Toni Frissell, hosted by Wikimedia Commons, Public domain; cropped.

 
 

Free F’All Predates 9/11 by Four Years

Hyperallergic identifies Free F’All as a 1997 sculpture, so it was not created in response to the attack that killed the artist.

That chronology does not make the 2026 placement emotionally neutral. It instead asks viewers to hold two histories at once: Richards’s earlier meditation on Black aviation, vulnerability, and attempted transcendence, and the later facts of his death and the anniversary display.

Treating the sculpture as prophecy collapses those histories. Reading the dates in order preserves the work’s original subject while explaining why the same figure carries an unavoidable additional weight in the Brooklyn Museum today.