On a recent afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in a small gallery across from the atrium where crowds jostled beneath paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, more than a dozen visitors were fully horizontal. They stretched out on circular beds covered in tie-dyed comforters and rugs printed with the words “rest in power.” A meditative, humming soundtrack filled the space; one of the beds rocked gently, like a boat at sea. A few museumgoers were scrolling on their phones. But most were asleep.
The installation, on view through May 14, is a 2023 work by the multimedia artists Navild Acosta, 27, and Fannie Sosa, 29, creators of what one might think of as an anti-performance series called “Black Power Naps.” Acosta and Sosa began the project in response to research, including a 2015 article in the peer-reviewed journal Sleep, that found that Black Americans were five times as likely as white Americans to get too little sleep, which experts define as less than six hours a night. MoMA has welcomed everyone to take part in “Black Power Naps,” making free tickets available each day, but Acosta and Sosa say they designed it especially with Black visitors in mind. A sign at the entrance reads: “If you see a Black person resting, don’t call the police!” In March, MoMA security asked the Ghanaian artist Heather Agyepong to leave the installation after another visitor accused her of being “aggressive,” an action for which the museum later publicly apologized. At an earlier exhibit of the work in Madrid, a group of white men destroyed sculptures and pulled stuffing out of pillows; conservative commentators have accused Acosta and Sosa of racism.
“Black Power Naps” arrived in New York at a moment when we are all re-evaluating our relationship to labor. In China, the “lie flat” movement, which encourages young people to scale back their work schedules, became widespread enough to draw an official rebuke from President Xi Jinping in 2021. A record number of Americans also quit their jobs last year. Workaholism is no longer something to brag about. And so the question “What if we just … didn’t?” has become one that artists, in particular, are exploring with new urgency.
For most of human existence, only the most privileged have had the opportunity to truly opt out. When the luxury and wellness industries have emphasized sleep, it has often been as a conduit to a more successful work life — in 2016, the media executive Arianna Huffington published a book, “The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time,” about how sleep improves productivity.
Then came the pandemic, when sleep and work were both severely disrupted. It’s no coincidence that artists and institutions like MoMA have turned to rest as a revolutionary act in a moment when the very idea of productivity is being rethought. You can see this new suspicion toward seizing the day reflected in the work of painters like Jennifer Packer of New York and Alina Perez from Miami, whose subjects have long lounged and dozed but whose deeply saturated color palettes now suggest something closer to a state of dreamlike calm. You can see it as well in the work of the Atlanta-based performance artist Tricia Hersey, the founder of an organization called the Nap Ministry, which promotes sleep as a tool for Black liberation. Then there’s the Puerto Rican choreographer Nibia Pastrana Santiago, who is best known for her manifesto “The Lazy Dancer,” a kind of call to inaction for an especially exhausted public. “I am going to make an effort to be lazier,” she begins, before declaring that she “has no duty to dance.”
Though a rejection of the perpetual grind is a recent development, Western artists have depicted humans at rest for centuries. Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso and van Gogh are among the artists who have made works with the title “Reclining Nude.” In 1972, Chris Burden turned the act of sleep into performance art with “Bed Piece,” which saw him doze in a sparsely furnished gallery in Venice, Calif., during business hours for 22 consecutive days. Immobility also has a long history in the annals of political resistance — sit-ins; die-ins; the bed-ins pioneered in the 1960s by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, which the professor and writer Franny Nudelman explores in “Fighting Sleep” (2019). Today’s artists continue that tradition but seem to have updated it for an era in which the personal is ever more political, and self-care is seen as critical to the sustainability of activism. To sleep, especially in public, is to be vulnerable, but it’s also to claim your inherent dignity, to be unapologetically, rather than to do.
