The Black Rest Project (BRP) at CBVC began in 2022. This collaborative interrogation and activation of the power and practice of rest for global Black people is our focus and theme for the next two years. The BRP is inspired by the work of artist, theologist and activist Tricia Hersey, a.k.a. The Nap Bishop. Through the guidance of the Black Rest Advisory Council, and by cultivating strategic partnerships with visionary scholars, cultural workers, artists and community organizations, we seek to excavate, curate, and amplify visual narratives of Black rest and leisure. We recognize that Black Rest must accompany a renegotiation with labor that accounts for the historical racial and gendered dynamics set into motion by the transatlantic slave trade.

The project asks what are the necessary disruptions and interventions in our institutions and artistic and scholarly praxis that must happen in order to make Black rest possible? What possibilities open for Black Rest when our relationship to labor is contextualized through an emotional justice framework?  How do we eradicate the lingering feelings of guilt, laziness, shame, worthlessness that often impede Black rest? How do we separate Black rest, from the individual and often neo-liberal industry of self-care and reposition it as a collective right? And as an exercise in black feminist radical imagination, we ask “What would the world look like of Black women could rest?”

Our model––building partnerships with scholars, artists, and cultural workers to produce events around Black Rest—was created specifically to push past the walls of academia and support healing and well-being in multiple, diverse spaces. The formation of the Black Rest Project Advisory Council marked the fulfillment of another outstanding goal: establishing a project specific advisory board that amplified our core values. In addition to substantially increasing the impact of the Black Rest Project, our Advisory Council has helped us maximize our new space, create new visual histories and archives, generate exciting ideas for websites, podcasts, exhibitions, public art commissions, community gatherings, graduate student engagement, interdisciplinary labs for young artists across multiple disciplines and expand our student relationships. They have been critical in helping us realize our plan to strengthen our leadership role in the conversation on Black visual culture.