Tricia HerseyNobel Conference 60
Tricia Hersey
Performance Artist, Theologian and Founder of The Nap Ministry
Rest as Portal for Justice
When we think about a good night’s sleep, we often wonder about the role of rest and naps during the day. Should one take a nap? If so, then how long? Or when? Will an afternoon nap disturb one’s sleep? Or promote it? Is a nap a waste of time or a sign of weakness? Are the demands of the day so pressing that rest is simply out of the question?
Someone who radically expands common conceptions of rest and sheds a powerful light on relationships between rest, justice, and healing is Tricia Hersey. Hersey’s book, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, was an instant New York Times best seller. In it, she outlines the lies and dangers of a “grind-culture” that normalizes stress, anxiety, and pressure, and she illustrates how rest is a serious public health, racial justice, and spiritual issue. Her ongoing attention to the liberating power of rest led her to establish the Nap Ministry, a pioneering movement that helped spark growing global attention to rest.
Hersey is a performance artist, activist, and theologian, and her work builds on a wide range of disciplines, experiences, and resources. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from Eastern Illinois University and a Master of Divinity from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Her work is also deeply influenced by her experiences as the daughter of an abolitionist pastor, as a native of the South Side of Chicago, and as the torch-bearer of her family’s Mississippi and Louisiana roots. Her upbringing is woven throughout her two decades of experience as a teaching artist, chaplain, poet, theater-maker, performance artist, and community organizer. She necessarily dissolves these boundaries to unlock mental, physical, and spiritual spaces for radical thought and imagination. The wideness of her practice opens portals and possibilities of world-building and future-casting while embodying the teachings of somatic therapies, womanism, womanist theology, Black Liberation Theology, Afrofuturism, and her ancestors.
From these diverse reservoirs of knowledge, Tricia created the “rest is resistance” and “rest as reparations” frameworks that inform her Nap Ministry. The writings and the immersive experiences that Hersey creates through and outside of her Nap Ministry call us to move far beyond mainstream concepts of wellness. She asks us to study the ways in which our divinity, higher purpose, and ability to resist violent and oppressive systems are intertwined with how we access our rest, imagination, and Dream-Space. Her work is a pathway to practices of rest that are needed to collectively build and imagine new worlds as we simultaneously dismantle and deprogram ourselves from systems that prop up and perpetuate racial, social, and environmental injustice.
Known as the “Nap Bishop,” Hersey has exhibited artworks, delivered talks, and created collective napping experiences for a range of institutions, such as the School of the Art Institute Chicago, MOCA Cleveland, Speed Museum, Flux Projects, United States Peace Corps, Google Global, MIT, and Brown University. Her words and work have also been featured in various publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, PlayBoy, Afropunk, Complex Magazine, Dutch Vogue, NPR All Things Considered, Bon Appetit, USA Today, and The Atlantic.
Tricia Hersey is a performance artist, theologian, and founder of The Nap Ministry. She holds a Master of Divinity degree from Candler School of Theology, Emory University.
Her lecture
What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine-level pace -- feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit.
In my lecture, I hope to place an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. I believe our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us. Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. My Rest is Resistance framework is a call to action, a battle cry, a field guide, and a manifesto for all of us who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of grind culture.
Rest is a portal for justice. We are enough. The systems cannot have us. We must rest. We Will Rest!