Black Power Naps Asks, “How Can We Dream If We Don’t Sleep?”

Navild Acosta: The question, “How can we dream if we don’t sleep?” came from a Langston Hughes poem called “Harlem,” which talks about a dream deferred.

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 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.

La Biblioteca Is Open implies that there is reading and understanding happening. The Black Power Naps library is filled with Sosa’s books from their research and study. We’re graciously being loaned Sosa’s library and placing it in the show.

Sosa: It is my migrant library that I’ve been carrying around for a decade. There came a moment when we were doing Black Power Naps when I was houseless and it became really hard to take this library with me. We decided to merge it with the work and it’s been traveling alongside ever since. It’s a living library and one that comes through a lot of separation and strife, but also a lot of deep research and fun.

Navild Acosta: I think it is very important to remind us all that we’re doing this because we have fun. We are really trying to land it in a place of joy and laughter and humor—and also kindness. For me, I truly thought it was a cool idea to sleep under The Starry Night.

Sosa: I think this building has seen a lot and has hosted a lot of problematic art. It still does. There’s a side of me that wants to see something different, urgently. I really would like to see our people at the museum.

It’s not going to resolve all the issues, because the issues we talked about—visibility, exposure—are not an end-all. But I do think that it helps the imagination to see this. And I think that’s where we’re at. We’re in the realms of dreaming, the realms of imagination, and that’s where it’s at for us.