Lauren Halsey

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Lauren Halsey, opening on November 14 at the gallery’s Park & 75 location. The installation is composed of protruded engravings and a large-scale plaza sign sculpture—honoring the aesthetics of her home community in South Central Los Angeles and the diasporic, mythological features of Black life in the United States.

The six-foot-tall sculpture from the plaza sign series (2024–) pays homage to the iconography, color palettes, and creative wordplay commonly found on Black- and Brown-owned business signage in working-class neighborhoods. Whereas signs like “Watts Happening” are tributes to artist- and community-run cultural centers, others like “Dreams and Things” and “Sisters Serving the Community” are a call to action and a reminder of the historic and current roles that community members and institutions play in stewarding Black and Brown neighborhoods amid conditions of economic inequality, systemic racism, state violence, gentrification, and displacement.

The monochrome sculptural reliefs in the protruded engravings series (2022–), on the other hand, assemble a historical, contemporary, and mythical graphic record of Black culture in Los Angeles. Like the cosmological carvings of ancient Egypt and Mesoamerican civilizations, Halsey’s engravings appear almost hieroglyphic, transforming South Central residents, institutions, and everyday moments into ciphers that illuminate alternative constructions of the past, present, and future. She places their expressive cultures and community designs into a dynamic exchange with Afro-diasporic mythologies, Funk music and aesthetics, personal memory, and collective history.