“There’s always a community ethos. I don’t see art and architecture as separate from the community. They’re sort of a cause and effect.”
—Lauren Halsey.
Widely known for site-specific installations that speak to her upbringing in South Central L.A., Lauren Halsey’s work took over The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof garden during the summer of 2023. Commissioned by the museum, Halsey erected a version of a Pharaonic temple, remixing ancient architectural forms with contemporary urban expressions: hieroglyphs translated into graffiti tags, and monuments to ancient elite reconstructed as celebrations of her family and friends.
Published in 2020 to benefit the non-profit Project Angel Food, thang demonstrates Lauren Halsey’s commitment to intersecting art and community engagement. That same year, Halsey founded her own community center, Summaeverything; this very collage serves as the central image for the project’s website, visually embodying its mission as a site to empower South Central’s predominantly Black and Brown community through food and art.
As a digital collage, thang depicts Halsey’s interest in world-building within a two-dimensional format. Here, the architecture of imagination creates a colorful refuge and celebration of black culture. The highly dense composition includes bubblegum blowing Pharoah heads, clowns, unicorns, family snapshots, golden grills, memes, bright red nail extensions, and advertisements from local businesses. Although this fantasy scape is superimposed onto a cosmic plane, the work remains grounded in Halsey’s highly personal imagery. This colorful network of symbols forms an introspective universe of inspiration. Viewers are flooded with mysterious symbolic interconnections and subsumed into the vibrant texture of a vision foregrounding joy.
