Lauren Halsey: emajendat
For the past decade, Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles, USA) has developed a distinct visual language deeply rooted in South Central Los Angeles where her family has lived for generations. Through objects and installations, Halsey archives and remixes the changing signs and symbols of her environment, gathering physical and graphic material from her neighbourhood. In her work Halsey merges past, present and future via her interest in iconography connected to the African diaspora, Black and queer icons and architecture. Halsey cites the collective sonic and visual layering associated with funk music as the blueprint for her approach to making, traversing time and drawing on a wide range of sources.
emajendat, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK, transforms Serpentine South Gallery into an immersive ‘Funk garden’ that responds to the building’s location in Kensington Gardens, offering an extension of the park into the galleries. Central to the exhibition is a life-size version of Halsey’s signature vignettes, usually seen in miniature within sculptures or as intricately arranged tableaux. Here, a prismatic floor and walls made from CD’s provide the setting for scaled-up figurines, funkmounds and a live water fountain. The artist’s first moving image work is presented alongside sand dunes and a bespoke wallpaper.
Halsey’s practice extends to Summaeverythang, a community centre she founded in 2019 that is ‘dedicated to the empowerment and transcendence of Black and Brown folks socio-politically, economically, intellectually and artistically.’ Her work offers a celebration of South Central’s vitality and a creative form of resistance to its evolving gentrification. Halsey approaches her gallery-based exhibitions and commissions as prototypes for one of her goals: creating a permanent sculpture park in South Central.
Artist Biography
Lauren Halsey (b. 1987; lives and works in Los Angeles, USA) earned a BFA from California Institute of Arts and an MFA from Yale University in 2014. Halsey has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Seattle Art Museum (2022); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018). Halsey presented monumental site-specific installations at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden in 2023. Halsey is the 2021 recipient of the Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize and received the Mohn Award for artistic excellence at the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2018 biennial. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. In 2019, Halsey founded Summaeverythang Community Center and is currently in the process of constructing sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles, a major public sculpture park in South Central Los Angeles.
