Rest as Art: BMoCA’s Divine Rest Nests Invites Reflection

Upon entering the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, you are welcomed in warmly by “I am worthy of tending,” written on the wall. Divine Rest Nests: An Invitation, running from May 22nd to September 1st of this year, lives up to its name, and offers even more once experienced. The guest curator, Cristina Aguilar, says this exhibit is a continuation of last year’s exhibit, Sacred & Soft Landing/Soñar y Descansar. Plans for the current exhibit began long before the U.S. federal election results, which only exacerbated the indispensability of the collectives’ black, brown, indigenous, trans, and queer artists’ messages. You may have heard the phrase “Rest as Resistance” as coined by the founder of the Nap Ministry Tricia Hersey, and wondered how to take the concept out of the theoretical, into the substantial. You may have asked how a bubble bath can create social change, and  how rest is even possible when the political climate is so relentlessly urgent. Each of the artists featured tackle these questions head-on, transforming them into embodied, immersive spaces where rest becomes both a refuge and a form of defiance.

Cal Duran, a two-spirit mixed-heritage artist from Colorado, looks to his ancestors and teachers, past and present, to construct his rest nest. Curtained with beads and bells, the vibrant, patterned room is crowned by a large papier mache heart, retrieved from its co-creator in Santa Fe. Duran reminds us with his nest, weaved with the teachings of White Spider and elaborate ojos de dios watching over, that the heart is at the center of our beings and that, “The heart travels.” 

Lilian Lara, a garment artist, glows in a sea-glass-looking castle, which is actually made out of organza fabric. It’s her largest project to date, taking over 300 hours to sew, and it evokes dreamscapes where place, time, and familiarity blur into something both inextricable and interchangeable. Lara says, “Dreams let us fail in ways that we never would have in reality,” and shares that the two large doorways through her nest are meant not only for wheelchair accessibility, but also for those who struggle with the concept of rest and may need a way to gently step away.

Lares Feliciano, a collage and animation artist, washes you in nostalgia with her interactive nest: a day-bed framed by twinkle lights laid before a TV playing 80’s and 90’s infomercials, surrounded by boxes of toys that invite the guests’ inner children to play and find rest they may not have been afforded in childhood. 

Samantha Hutchinson-Ouranos, who goes by Sammiotzi, is a Mexican-American mother and graphic designer who answers the questions “What keeps you from resting” and “what helps you rest.” The translucent curtain panels leading into her piece have scrawled on them reasons for unrest: white supremacy, violencia, ecological collapse and more. Once having acknowledged the very real restrictions to rest many of us face everyday, Hutchinson-Ouranos invites us to lay in the peaceful and weighted embrace of a nonbinary, watched over by a projection of a cosmic guardian. 

The exhibit totals seven nests, each in conversation with one another. Curator Aguilera says that “Before we even opened these doors, the show was already existing” suggesting that these seven artists’ manifestations of rest had grown outside of the gallery doors and had already begun to touchand change the world. The invitation extends to you now, to experience, to let yourself be changed by rest, and to carry that transformation into all you create in these exhausting times.