LAUREN HALSEY

(B. 1987)

Untitled

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, US (acquired from the artist in 2022).



Born in 1987 in South Central Los Angeles, California, Lauren Halsey is one of the definitive rising talents of her generation. Centering her neighborhood as her ongoing muse and subject, Halsey's practice combines the act of documenting, archiving, and collecting through the people she knows, objects she has gathered and things she has seen to then construct, make space for, and finally 'set in stone' their stories and iconographies into symbols for the future. Taking inspiration from Ancient Egyptian art and artifacts, Afrofuturism, funk, and art history, Halsey inscribes figures, commercial signs, graffiti, and other visual insignia onto the surfaces of her work. "Halsey, mental time traveler that she is..." writes journalist Sid Feddema, "sees the beauty of her community's culture from a vantage outside of time and space. 'A thousand years, fifteen million years from now,' [Halsey] says, clearly enjoying the thought. She intends for the project to serve as a permanent monument that will show future generations who and what was here" ("To Be Funky Forever and Remembered as Such," Flaunt, Issue 163, pp. 80-83).

The result is a visual vocabulary in which Halsey fully celebrates the emblems of hyperlocal culture while also historicizing them, acting as resilience to the forces of gentrification, globalization, and cultural erasure that today threaten many communities. "I'm an obsessive collector of objects, of images—scanning the streets," Halsey has said. "I've been collecting as long as I could breathe" (as quoted in: Robin Pogrebin, "Lauren Halsey Brings Her Vision of South Central Los Angeles to New York," The New York Times, 6 May 2022, online). In Untitled, images important to Black culture—including a figure in a durag, advertisements related to hair products, a boom box, the FUBU and NBA logos—are combined with graffiti, the planet Saturn, Ancient Egyptian symbols—including the Eye of Horus, a pyramid, and an Egyptian falcon (a symbol for Horus). Crucially, among the work's diverse iconography are messages of empowerment and joy, reading "Hope, Hope, Hope," "We Are Still Here," and "Think Positive," imbuing the piece with a celebratory joy and an encouragement towards social activism.

Untitled is particularly distinguished by its silver metallic surface, at once evoking the centuries-old practice of engraving on metals, ancient civilizations like Egypt, Nubia and Byzantine, as well as science fiction and outer space—effectively connecting past, present and future. In art history, silver was arguably the most important color for Andy Warhol, recalling the 'silver screen', photography, and the proliferation and mass consumption of images that so deeply affected (and continues to affect) modern life. By distributing this selection of images in her work through an object that resembles an artifact, Halsey makes space for the culture of South Central Los Angeles to have a place in the wider collective imagination now and in the future.

Notably, Halsey executes this work on her signature support—foil-insulated foam—a material she utilizes because of her ongoing interest in architecture and environments. Having initially begun her university studies at El Camino College to study architecture, the artist has an acute awareness of the way that space impacts people and communities, and has made immersive environments a central aspect of her œuvre—evident in some of her recent installations at the 2023 Metropolitan Museum of Art rooftop commission, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I); the 2024 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, keepers of the krown; and 2024-25 solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London, Lauren Halsey: emajendat. With community engagement and social activism always at the core of Halsey's practice, these environments crucially serve to create physical space for the rich history and culture of Black communities that has been historically underrepresented in elite art world contexts. As the artist Charles Gaines—under whom Halsey studied at the California Institute of the Arts—explains: "she's trying to bring into the realm of art things that are thought to be low culture, things that are victimized by a certain stereotype" (Id., The New York Times).

Co-represented by Gagosian and David Kordansky Gallery, Lauren Halsey's work is in the permanent collection of several prestigious institutions worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, among many others. In May 2025, Halsey, together with the actress Jane Fonda, will be the honorees for the Hammer Museum's annual Gala in the Garden. Aside from her artistic practice, Halsey also runs Summaeverythang, a community center whose mission is to be "a site to develop Black and Brown empowerment: personal, political, economic, and sociocultural" (Douglas Kearney, Summaeverythang.org).