About this Event
Join Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, for an experimental and interactive course on tapping into your artistic imagination to carve out an intentional practice in crafting radical performance art. We will engage in a slow and intentional discovery of sustainable community art interventions using DIY practices, liberation theory and play. Come ready to daydream.
About the Free Street Institute: Free Street's Certification Program is designed to give you the skills of Free Street's leaders & artists. From devising to performance art, spend time with our artists and sharpen your creative practice.
About Tricia Hersey:
When you experience the work of artist Tricia Hersey you are witnessing a practice unbound, defying the lines that are often drawn between disciplines, methodologies, and schools of thought. Tricia’s craft has taken a lifetime to perfect. It is 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, theatermaker, 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 somatics, womanism, womanist theology, Black Liberation Theology, Afrofuturism, and her ancestors.
From these vast reservoirs of knowledge, Tricia created the ‘rest is resistance’ and ‘rest as reparations’ frameworks and founded The Nap Ministry, a global pioneer and originator of the movement to understand the liberatory power of rest. Tricia’s words and the immersive experiences she creates through and outside of The Nap Ministry are calling 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 DreamSpace. Her work is a pathway to the rest practices needed to collectively build and imagine new worlds as we simultaneously dismantle and deprogram ourselves from the systems that prop up and perpetuate the racial, social, and environmental harm done by white supremacy and extractive capitalism.
When considered in its totality, Tricia’s practice is limitless and experiential in ways that words on a page can never contain. It washes us with a new consciousness that proves rest is not a luxury, but a human right and a deliberate rebuking of the oppressive structures that are snatching the souls of humanity. Every work that Tricia creates is a balm in the form of artistic and spiritual practice and each piece provokes a collective reawakening, offering us a blueprint for a rest revolution. Through her practice we can gather and grow the tools that will help us construct and unveil truly liberated worlds and futures.
Tricia has 20 years of experience as a teaching artist, archivist assistant, community activist, and arts-integrated curriculum developer with Chicago Public Schools, Columbia College Chicago, Steppenwolf Theatre, United States Peace Corps, Emory University Rare Books and Manuscript Library, and numerous community organizations and universities in nationwide and internationally.
Hersey has exhibited artworks, delivered talks, and created collective napping experiences with School of the Art Institute Chicago, MOCA Cleveland, Speed Museum Louisville, Flux Projects Atlanta, Atlanta Contemporary Art, Smart Museum Chicago, Arts House Melbourne, United States Peace Corps, Google Global, MIT, Brown University, and many more.Her words and work have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, PlayBoy, Afropunk, The Atlantic, Complex Magazine, Dutch Vogue, NPR All Things Considered, USA Today, Bon Appetit, and others. 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.
On Pricing: Our certificate sessions support keeping our work free/pay-what-you-can and our community paid. By purchasing ticket, you support paying for not only the time + expertise of the facilitator, but our entire community.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
4625 S Ashland Ave, 4625 South Ashland Avenue, Chicago, United States
USD 215.26
