Lauren Halsey

It’s not just abt future it’s abt here/now 2
—Lauren Halsey

Based in South Central Los Angeles, where her family has lived for generations, Lauren Halsey creates immersive installations that bridge sculpture and architecture, and graphically maximalist collages that blend real and imagined geographies. She recontextualizes and reinterprets local vernacular sources such as flyers, murals, signs, and tags—icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, Halsey’s work offers a form of creative resistance to the forces of gentrification. In addition to the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, the artist employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means of reclaiming lost legacies. She is also inspired by the Afrofuturist aesthetics of funk music and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio.

Born in Los Angeles in 1987, Halsey earned a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from Yale University in 2014. In 2018, she presented we still here, there at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. A cavernous installation of cement illuminated in many bright and iridescent colored surfaces, it was filled with figurines, objects, signage, incense, and oils, acting as a historical storehouse for South Central’s material culture. The following year, Halsey’s first solo exhibition in Europe, Too Blessed 2 be Stressed! at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, featured an immersive environment of objects linking diasporic cultures from Los Angeles to Paris. In 2021, Halsey was commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to produce a series of banners combining contemporary images from her neighborhood with ancient Egyptian and Nubian works from the museum’s collection.