L.A. Story

LOS ANGELES occupies a NEAR-MYTHOLOGICAL PLACE in the psyche of the AMERICAN ART WORLD. But for some of the city's most compelling ARTISTS and CULTURE SHIFTERS, it represents a different kind of CREATIVE TRADITION one that's shaped it from the GROUND UP.

- STEPHEN MOOALLEM

LAUREN HALSEY

ARTIST

Halsey, whose collages, sculptures, and installations draw upon elements of Afrofuturism, pharaonic architecture, and the history and culture of South Central, is preparing for upcoming shows in 2024 at both Gagosian's Paris outpost and London's Serpentine Galleries.

Even before Lauren Halsey's artwork was installed this past spring on the rooftop of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, she knew it would one day wind up back in Los Angeles. The piece, a sculptural work titled The eastside of South Central Los Angeles Hieroglyph Prototype Architecture (I), is a 22-foot-high, open-air structure modeled on aspects of the Egyptian Temple of Dendur on view in the museum's galleries and commissioned as part of its ongoing Roof Garden series. Halsey's work, though, is covered in carved hieroglyphs featuring images, phrases, and portraits of artists and friends drawn from her own life growing up in South Central Los Angeles, where her family has lived since the 1920s. Sphinx-like statues of her mother, her brother, a cousin, and her longtime partner, Monique McWilliams, guard the entrances.

Halsey, who still lives and works in South Central, has a spot in her neighborhood picked out for the piece to be reinstalled permanently and is now working through the logistics involved in making it happen. "It's going to exist on a block in the middle of the rhythm of the street, which is amazing," she tells me. "It will return to the context that it emanates from."

JUDY BACA

ARTIST