CULTURE
ack in 1975, a collective of African American musicians, led by the visionary
George Clinton, was staging ritualistic, retrofuturistic concerts in stadiums
around the country. As Parliament-Funkadelic, the group espoused a cosmic
mythology while playing music that was equal parts ancient and cutting-edge. The
ultimate goal: black liberation.
Lauren Halsey wasn’t even born when all this went down, but the 32-year-old
artist knows by heart the incantation that would sometimes accompany a flying sau-
cer—aka “the Mothership”—landing onstage: “You have overcome, for I am here!”
Halsey recites over the phone, while walking to the former beauty supply store and
minimarket in South Central Los Angeles that she’s in the process of transforming
into an art studio. “I saw the old marquee and signage, with ‘Beauty Supply’ painted
underneath,” Halsey says of the nearly 6,000-square-foot building, “and I thought,
‘Oh wow, what a treat to take in all that energy.’”
The South Central native draws from that same energy to build her own version
of Motherships—brightly colored collages and installations that mix architecture
with urban history, urban planning, and funk’s heavy lightness. Her sculptures and
installations have landed everywhere from New York’s Center for Architecture to
Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton. But each piece centers on South Central L.A., in-
voking her roots to summon the future.
“My dad’s side of the family has been here since 1927,” Halsey says. “My mom’s side,
since 1930-something. She’s been a teacher at the same school since before I was born,
and my dad’s an accountant with a lot of neighborhood pride.” She laughs while recalling
people’s reactions to finding out where she grew up. “They’re waiting to hear, you know,
Boyz n the Hood,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘It was amazing! Glitter and playing tennis in
the middle of the street and ice cream trucks and total freedom!’”
Listening to her parents’ P-Funk records was its own kind of salvation. “I just put
on my headphones and went berserk! Just to have that space to experience myselfdifferently, my most ideal self, without having to leave
my bedroom. It was so extra, so dense. And then by 15 or
16, as I was getting into my queerness, I saw the queer-
ness that was happening in the band. I started making
these collages where I was, like, funkatizing the neigh-
borhood and funkatizing the people. It changed me.”
During high school at the Los Angeles Center for
Enriched Studies, Halsey gathered these collages into a
portfolio. Her aunt, a writer, introduced her to the artist
Dominique Moody. “She had something special kind of
nesting inside her,” Moody says. “She would embellish
her sneakers with this incredibly intricate patterned
imagery that had its own narrative and no symmetry.”
Moody suggested she look into 3-D coursework, and
Halsey wound up studying architecture at nearby El
Camino College. She wasn’t so much interested in new
construction as she was in “being able to think about
how I can have a say in what’s built in my neighbor-
hood.” And then figuring out how her neighbors could,
too. Gentrification was on the horizon, and intertwined
with the glitter and total freedom was evidence of strug-
gle. “All the bars, all the bulletproof glass, all this armor
around the buildings—that really fucks with your heart,”
she says. “So I wanted to create these ‘interventions.’”
Halsey went on to earn a BFA at California Institute
of the Arts in Valencia and an MFA at Yale University,
then accepted an artist-in-residence position in 2014B
ARTFROM LEFT: HALSEY IN SOUTH
CENTRAL L.A. EARLIER
THIS YEAR; POSTERS HALSEY
PRODUCED IN 2012.Make It Funky
Artist Lauren Halsey’s work
straddles South Central L.A.
and George Clinton’s Afrofuturist
utopia. By Jesse DorrisHALSEY: COLUMBINE GOLDSMITH;WHAT IF WE OWNED?: COURTESY OF DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY;THE CRENSHAW DISTRICT HIEROGLYPHPROJECT (PROTOTYPE ARCHITECTURE): BRIAN FORREST;SUMWHERE N SUMWHEN ELSE: COURTESY OF DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY.128