Rest Lab has become a consistent outlet to explore centering care—a core value in our strategic plan. This space and invitation for intentional resting continues to make a home at KAM roughly twice a year. It appears in the museum in a different spot each time, depending on which gallery is resting. With a focus on intersectionality, each Rest Lab sees the education team experimenting with different modes, methods, and tools of resting.
In the spring 2023 version of Rest Lab, gentle sounds of lapping water filled the room, alongside a wall-length projection of gentle waves in our Contemporary Gallery. On another wall, Faces at KAM gave visitors a chance to check in with themselves and reflect on their state of mind/body, while making playful connections to our permanent collection. A large sheet of paper on another wall invited pencil scribbles, large enough that one could draw with both hands, arms outstretched. All these interactive exhibits welcomed visitors to engage in restful, contemplative ways.
In early 2023, we invited local artists to take up space in Rest Lab to share their work. Visual artist Matt Harsh and sound artist John McNally (performing as Twoleggedzoo), alongside Urbana Dance Company, presented a performance that transformed the gallery into an immersive arts experience. As part of a new program, we welcomed Urbana Free Library storytellers into the galleries for a Restful Storytime at KAM for children and caregivers. A collaboration with architecture professor Joseph Altschuler’s graduate design studio class asked students to design spatial elements for Rest Lab in November 2023.
The Wellness Working Group, led by Ishita Dharap together with members of campus and local community organizations, centers the relationship between art and wellness. This group devised the Arts Wellness Wave—a week-long campus and community-wide initiative—in fall 2023. More rest-focused programs continued in 2024 with Rest Lab: In Search of Rest, which emphasized connection, requesting needs, and responding to those requests. The fall 2024 exhibition drew more attention to the body and offered rest tools and a chance to try out Wendy Jacobs’s Squeeze Chair.
A question our team at KAM keeps asking is, what qualifies as “rest”? The pandemic has led to deep exhaustion, resulting in an urgent need to rest—and rest frequently. This position pushes against popular definitions of productivity and “grind culture,” ideas especially ingrained at a university. Rest has been thoughtfully interrogated by Black, indigenous, people of color, and disability justice advocates (including who gets to rest, when and where it can happen, and what it looks like). In addition to spaces that provide a chance for physical rest, there is a need for spaces that allow our minds to rest. In response to the toll of pandemic grief, community violence, and structural inequities, we know that wellness requires critical work to repair our broken social systems. This is a burden we are all carrying. The idea of being well breaks down over and over again, and there is a need to ask—in community—what we seek as wellness.
This work is slow yet deliberate; we work alongside uncertain futures but always toward expanding our own ideas about rest and well-being. While we support each other in challenging harmful systems, we need safe spaces to pause, take a breath, close our eyes, and imagine what other worlds are possible. Our hope is that Rest Lab becomes that space.
Author: Ishita Dharap, Education Coordinator
