Tricia Hersey has over 20 years of experience as a multidisciplinary artist, writer, theologian and community organizer. She is a Chicago native who has called Atlanta home for 13 years. Tricia is the founder of The Nap Ministry, the originator of the ‘rest as resistance’ and ‘rest as reparations’ frameworks, and creates sacred spaces where the liberatory, restorative, and disruptive power of rest can take hold.
The Nap Ministry is an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations by curating spaces for the community to rest via community rest activations, immersive workshops, performance art installations, and social media. Tricia’s work is seeded within the soils of Black radical thought, somatics, Afrofuturism, womanism, and liberation theology, and is a guide for how to collectively deprogram, decolonize, and unravel ourselves from the wreckage of capitalism and white supremacy.
Her work has been seen at: MOCA Cleveland, School of the Art Institute Chicago, Speed Art Museum, Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, and organizations nationwide and internationally. 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.
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.
To learn more about the Back Rest Project and the Black Rest Advisory Council, go to their website.