Humber Lecture—Michael Richards: Are You Down? Curators in Conversation

Join us for a talk with the Michael Richards retrospective curators, Melissa Levin and Alex Fialho, as they discuss Richards’s wide-ranging artistic practice and their work since 2016 curating exhibitions dedicated to the artist. The talk includes introductory remarks by Dawn Dale, Michael Richards’s cousin, who has stored and cared for Richards’s artworks for over two decades since his passing.

This talk takes place in person and is also available online as a live stream.

About the speakers
Alex Fialho is a curator and PhD candidate in the History of Art and African American Studies Departments at Yale University. Fialho previously worked as programs director of the New York–based arts nonprofit Visual AIDS. Fialho’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogues for the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.

Melissa Levin is an arts administrator and curator. She is currently the inaugural New York City–based associate program officer with the Jerome Foundation. She previously worked at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) as vice president of cultural programs, where she oversaw artist residencies, exhibitions, and public programming. She holds a BA with honors in visual art and art history from Barnard College.

Fialho and Levin have curated exhibitions together since 2014, including Trisha Brown: Embodied Practice and Site Specificity, and (Counter)Public: Art, Intervention & Performance in Lower Manhattan from 1978–1993. Since 2016 they have curated critically acclaimed exhibitions dedicated to Michael Richards’s art, life, and legacy, including Michael Richards: Are You Down?, which was highlighted by Frieze magazine as one of the “top 10 shows in the United States of 2021.”

Dawn Dale is Michael Richards’s cousin, the caretaker of his art, and the steward of his estate.

Support provided by the Robert Lee Humber Lectures Endowment.

Alex Fialho, Dawn Dale, and Melissa Levin in front of exhibition signage for Michael Richards: Are You Down? at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in 2021. Photo: Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami