
“We’re not going to celebrate that bicentennial because we weren’t free. I’ll tell you what, we won’t celebrate, but let’s have a wake and resurrection.”~Faith Ringgold
Bena and Buba (1976), 70 x 36 x 4 in, Flag Pad (1976) 70 x 36 x 2 in, Moma and Nana (1976), 76 x 40 x 16 in, Flowers (1976) 18 x 22 x 12 in, Three in a Bed (1981) 10 x 24 x 22 in
In 1976, Faith Ringgold created the performance The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro, a multi-media performance piece that she created as a response to the celebration of the United States Bicentennial commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
Since she was not given exhibition opportunities in New York, Ringgold had started showing her work outside of the city in the 1970s. With the work that she had been developing, such as the paintings mounted on fabric that could be rolled and her soft sculptures, it became easy to travel with an entire exhibition packed into a suitcase. Ringgold hired a booking agent and became very sought after for her exhibitions and lectures, especially at university campuses across the United States where audiences were often not from an arts background but from different departments such as sociology, Black studies, or writing. Her performance The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro was especially successful and was performed many times between 1976 and 1981 with students as performers all over the United States.
The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro tells the story of Buba, who died of a drug overdose, and his wife Bena, who thereupon dies of grief. Both of the deceased are mourned by their relatives and acquaintances, but are then resurrected. After their resurrection, Buba is free of drugs and Bena has a greater sense of empowerment to live independently. Ringgold offers a dramatic narrative of the dynamics of racism. Drug addiction was an affliction Ringgold had personally been anguished by in her life: her first husband as well as her brother passed from drug overdoses. And there seemed to be no help for African Americans.
The performance originally consisted of four main sculptural ensembles: the main figures Bena and Buba, a flag cooling pad, the mourners Moma and Nana, and decorative flowers. Bena and Buba were sculpted in black satin fabric that was filled with foam to shape their bodies. Surrounded by flowers, they lay on a flag in the Pan-African colors red, black and green that Ringgold’s mother had padded and made into a “cooling pad” for the corpses. Their two main mourners are the figures Moma and Nana, two elegantly dressed women also fashioned from textured black satin and brocade fabrics, standing beside the deceased. They are crying tears of rhinestones and sequins. During the performance, Ringgold played recordings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech I Have a Dream and hymns performed by the Abyssinian Baptist Church Choir such as Amazing Grace and He Arose. The extremely well attended performances used students in each location as actors so that the performance was different in every place and reflected manifold ways of reacting to death.