at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Opening her studio
window let in all that 125th Street had to offer: drumlines,
parades, T-shirt vendors. “I formed relationships [with
people] and brought them up to my studio,” she says. “I
started thinking about hieroglyphs, and how they are a
permanent record—how I could sample that to talk about
people and assert our record into the canon, into history.”
Amanda Hunt, now the director of education and senior
curator of programs at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), was an associate curator at
the Studio Museum when Halsey arrived. “I’ve been in
various studios of Lauren’s over time, and what I’ve tak-
en away is that it’s social,” Hunt says. “There’s always a
collective community in there—music, conversation, and
her in the corner with gesso on her hands.”In 2018, Halsey was invited to participate in the bien-
nial show Made in L. A. at the city’s Hammer Museum.
Her piece, a mausoleum-like pavilion with some 600
engraved gypsum panels arranged in a grid, was titled
The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype
Architecture). Drawing upon both ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs and contemporary street art, the panels
incorporated black-owned business signage, barber
illustrations, and images of victims of violence. That
same year, Halsey went polychromatic and multima-
terial in we still here, there, her solo show at MOCA.
Housed within cool white grottoes constructed from
white cement and mosaicked CDs was an eye-popping
assortment of cultural ephemera: hair spray cans, durag
packaging, action figures, party flyers. The work was
politically engaged and queer—a proposition for what
black DIY spaces could look like.
At the moment, Halsey is getting ready for a major
solo show at David Kordansky’s cavernous L.A. gallery.
The gallerist had been familiar with Halsey’s art prac-
tice for some time, “but seeing her installations at the
Hammer and MOCA simultaneously [in 2018] was a
revelation,” he says. “Her work felt fresh and ambitious
yet rooted, poignantly, in L.A. and in our moment. It
had been a while since I’d been so moved by the work
of a young artist.”
Halsey’s also working on a major brand collabo-
ration that’s set to launch in the near future (she can’t
divulge with whom just yet) and dipping her toes in the
architecture of virtual reality. “Someone approached
me about it, and I was like, ‘What?’ But I went and tried
it, and my mind was blown,” she says. She’s looking
forward to researching and learning the programs to
create virtual worlds. “Imagine neon and fantasy ge-
ographies and all eras of funk—POC paradises that you
can experience,” she says. But grounded, as always, in a
South Central state of mind. Halsey’s back at her studio
now, which is around the corner from her mom’s place,
a stone’s throw from the store she’s bought lunch from
since middle school: “It’s just another extension of who
and what we always were.”FROM TOP: A
PORTION OF THE
PIECE HALSEY
CREATED FOR MADE
IN L.A. 2018 AT
THE HAMMER
MUSEUM; A DIGITAL
COLLAGE.“ALL THE BARS, ALL THE BULLETPROOF
GLASS, ALL THIS ARMOR AROUND
THE BUILDINGS—THAT REALLY FUCKS
WITH YOUR HEART.”