MoMA Institutes Long-Overdue ‘Energetic Reparations’ With A Trenchant New ‘Black Power Naps’ Installation

In a 2018 analysis of data from the Federal Reserve, scholars documented a persistent racial disparity in finances, finding that the median black household has less than fifteen percent of the wealth of the median white household, and that this “wealth gap” is as extreme today as before the Civil Rights era. What the statistics did not capture, but researchers at the Centers for Disease Control have independently shown, is that there is a concomitant discrepancy in hours of sleep. From disruptive work schedules to anxiety about poverty, blacks face a sleep gap. More than forty-three percent do not get a healthy amount of nightly rest.

The Afro-Latinx artists Navild Acosta and Sosa are committed to closing the sleep gap. Over the past several years, they have established Black Power Naps, designing spaces where people of color can rest. The spaces are as soft and comforting as might be expected, but also feature technologies the duo has invented to augment the processes of relaxation and healing. For instance, they have created a massive waterbed with drum shakers and a subwoofer underneath, gently vibrating the bodies of people resting together. This “Atlantic Reconciliation Station” evokes conditions of slave ships, subversively inverting conditions of cruelty for purposes of recuperation.

Recently installed at the Museum of Modern Art, Black Power Naps will provide respite in the most restless city on Earth for the next several months. MoMA has framed the project in terms that echo themes in the adjacent Merit Oppenheim retrospective. “How can we dream when we don’t sleep?” readers are asked on the museum website, a question that might plausibly be posed by any Surrealist.

Although this question also reverberates with Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech, and the importance of dreaming should never be discounted, Black Power Naps also has an important political dimension glossed on the MoMA site and made explicit in interviews with the artists. Acosta put it most clearly in a 2019 interview with Vice. “We need to be asking for economic reparations, but we also need to be asking for energetic reparations,” asserted the artist. “[A]nd that means abolishing structures that benefit off of our lack of sleep. We’re looking at an economy, a moment, where Black folks, indigenous folks, brown folks, migrant folks, are dealing with a sleeplessness, a restlessness that is connected to productivity, capitalism, a production-based society.”

The brilliance of Black Power Naps lies in the way that the project effectively addresses these issues in microcosm by providing comfort to those who have been injured while simultaneously injecting discomforting ideas into public discourse to goad systemic change. Sleeplessness was once weaponized as a means of controlling slaves through intentional depravation of a biological need and is still a factor perpetuating the wealth gap and the racial divide more broadly. Personal replenishment is a necessary condition for activism, given the hardships endured by the activist. Sleep equity is a requirement for equality, given the soporific oppression endured by countless people of color.

According to Sosa, the impetus for installing Black Power Naps in cultural institutions was opportunistic. “So we thought, Let’s take a nap on these bitches,” the artist told Vice back in 2019. “How can we make these bitches pay for our napping?” The repurposing of a cultural space is a political act, especially given past exclusion of blacks from the cultural milieu. But ultimately MoMA has not been repurposed. Rather the museum is fulfilling its cultural function, questioning the status quo, projecting the conditions for change.

How can we dream when we don’t sleep? How can we change if we don’t dream?