About Rest Lab
Rest Lab is an ongoing creative collaboration and intervention by artists Ishita Dharap and Kamila Glowacki that challenges capitalistic ideas of productivity, urgency, and hustle culture. Since 2022, six experimental pop-up experiences at a university campus and art museum invited museum visitors to rest with intention in museum galleries that are also “resting” between shows. Piloted in a time of overlapping crises, Rest Lab reframes our needs as generative.
Rest Lab is an experience that asks institutions like museums to be flexible, dynamic, and creative in what they offer visitors. By adopting an experimental, laboratory-like approach, we open conversations about the inflexibility that these kinds of cultural spaces can impose on their audiences, like capitalistic ideas of tying value to productivity, and other characteristics of white supremacy and ableism.
Our Inspiration
Artists and scholars like Audre Lorde, Dr. Devon Price, Tricia Hersey, Finnegan Shannon, Alice Wong, and many more have articulated through their writings, performances, and artistic work how rest can be reclaimed to imagine a better, softer, and more welcoming world for us all.
"By advocating for our right to be “lazy,” we can carve out space in our lives for play, relaxation, and recovery."
"I'm most excited by thinking about accessibility in ways that I’ve experienced with other disabled people, which is thinking of access as a really generative force"
About Us
Kamila Glowacki is a museum educator, musician, and multidisciplinary artist based in Champaign, Illinois. She is the Assistant Curator of Community Engagement and Learning at Krannert Art Museum, located at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2023, she was named the Illinois Art Education Association‘s Illinois Museum Educator of the Year and received the title of Best Music Scene Ambassador of the Decade by Smile Politely in 2019. Kamila's experiences in the Central Illinois DIY/punk music scene formed the foundation for her approach to community engagement. Kamila’s indie punk band, Nectar, exists as her main songwriting outlet.
Ishita Dharap is an artist and art educator. Her cyclical teaching and art-making practice excavates personal and communal discomfort through a rigorous practice of reflection and play. Her work has manifested in drawing, collage, time-based media, performance, sculpture, and installation. She received a Master’s in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020 and is currently a doctoral student in Art Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an Education Coordinator at Krannert Art Museum.