Earlier (July 2020) TEEN VOGUE: “Black Power Naps Is Addressing Systemic Racism in Sleep“
An interesting question is: Has Woke peaked? As evidence in the affirmative, during last November’s election, the Main Stream Media appeared to get the message from the White House to shut up about George Floyd and the Racial Reckoning in the hard news section of the newspapers.
On the other hand, in the back pages, the soft (headed) news section of the media, the culture industry doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.
How can we dream if we don’t sleep?
— MoMA The Museum of Modern Art (@MuseumModernArt) February 15, 2023
💤 Hear from the artists behind “Black Power Naps: La Biblioteca Is Open” on the sleep gap and how they address it with performance, art, fun, and unapologetic rest on #MoMAMagazine → https://t.co/A7m3ivBdvd pic.twitter.com/nQKWwUohEi
Ironically, this is partly because the culture industry works on a fairly glacial timeline. Even though the culture industry would seem like a slave to fashion, it has a hard time keeping up with fashions these days. Exhibits in major museums, for example, are typically booked years in advance, so many of the Events of 2023 reflect the now cringe thinking of 2020-21. For example, from the magazine of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan (perhaps one of the two most prestigious art museums in the U.S. along with the Metropolitan) early this year:
Black Power Naps Asks, “How Can We Dream If We Don’t Sleep?”
The artist duo is tackling the sleep gap by giving permission to rest—unapologetically.
Navild Acosta, Sosa, Naeem Douglas
Feb 2, 2023…“How can we dream if we don’t sleep?” That’s the question Black Power Naps poses in response to overwhelming evidence showing Black people in the United States are likely to get less sleep than their white counterparts. Black Power Naps is a project founded by artists and best friends Navild Acosta and Sosa. They tackle the “sleep gap” issue head-on through installations like La Biblioteca Is Open, currently installed in MoMA’s Paula and James Crown Creativity Lab.
… Navild Acosta: Hello, my name is Navild Acosta, and I am an artist and an organizer, and I am a Black trans queer native New Yorker.
Sosa: Hello, my name is Sosa and I am a mixed-race, Afro-Latina migrant to the wild world of the Global North.
Black Power Naps began with our interest in pleasure, in rest and play as radical gestures of interruption, construction, building, organizing. We started vibing and introducing each other to our art. We were touring a lot together and going through the motions of creating work in white institutions. Then we started speaking about reparations and what it would look like for the institutions to welcome us in better conditions with tangible effects. As Black or Afro-diasporic artists, we felt like our life force was being extracted in mostly white institutions. We had to shuck and jive, and dance and perform, and use our bodies. … Black Power Naps was born out of us talking and processing this exhaustion. …
Sosa: A dream deferred drying in the sun and then festering like a sore. What happens to a literal dream deferred? What happens when we cannot get sleep in the body? The project is about science, research data, which show there is a sleep gap. Dreams being deferred is something that is structural. It’s something that’s an inheritance from the legacy of slavery.
Navild Acosta: Like Colonialism, a lack of sleep was used to break will, to break sanity and the possibility of dreaming about being free. That still is carrying through, generations after. It hasn’t been that much time, so it’s still resonating in our bodies and our reality. What happens when we don’t dream is a question that Black Power Naps seeks to answer.
Black Power Naps is based on data, science, and facts. There are two main studies that illustrate the sleep gap. The first illustrates that there is at least a one-hour sleep gap between Black and white Americans. Black Americans are sleeping one hour less than white Americans.
The ambient gunshots don’t help.
The other study illustrates that Black Americans are not arriving at slow-wave sleep at the frequency that white Americans are. And slow-wave sleep is where we do all the repair in our bodies.
… For me, I truly thought it was a cool idea to sleep under The Starry Night.
Van Gogh’s painting, probably the single most popular work at MoMA.
