Booth U52
We are delighted to present Faith Ringgold's installation, The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro, in collaboration with Goodman Gallery.
The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro was Faith Ringgold’s first multimedia masked performance work. It was conceived as a performance art piece in response to the American Bicentennial celebrations of 1976. In Ringgold’s words: “I certainly agreed with many black people at the time that we had no reason to celebrate two hundred years of American independence; for almost half of that time we had been in slavery, and for most of the following years we had still been struggling to become fully free. (In the year 2076, however, we must turn things around so that all Americans can join the celebration.). So, this was a wake not a celebration. I wanted to create a visual narrative of the dynamics of racism, including the self-imposed oppression of drug addiction. As the story goes – Buba, the hero of The Wake, died because of drug addiction and Bena, the heroine, died of grief.”
This installation was first performed in 1976. Ringgold directed and toured this masked performance piece over the next five years with student participants throughout universities and colleges in the United States. Today the installation remains as an artifact and statement of this period of civil rights protest.
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