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Artist Lauren Halsey heads south to Los Angeles to collect something at dawn almost every day.
Along the way, he collects everything that catches his eye and takes pictures with his phone. These finds, along with the ephemera he’s accumulated since his collage years (magazine clippings, church statuettes, shiny foil palm trees, miniature cars, aquarium plants), fill every corner of Halsey’s Los Angeles studio and slowly creep in. his work.
The latest iterations of these creations are now displayed here: David Kordansky’s new gallery It’s the artist’s first major solo show in New York, at a show that opened in Chelsea on Friday.
“I document crossroads where I need to come back or follow,” Halsey said in a recent interview at the gallery where she set up the show. “I have to archive this thing or this person or this place or this spirit. Some days are easier than others – I find a business card. Other days I find a whole Sphinx. Or I find a figurine that shakes my world.”
“I’m an obsessive collector of objects and images – scouring the streets,” he added. “I collect as much as I can breathe.”
Wearing a camouflage baseball cap, a purple wool jacket and white high tops, Halsey exudes a simple yet focused energy. You can understand why he gets up early and goes to bed late – “I have so much to do” – and why a job is finished only when the deadline forces him to stop. “I can go on,” Halsey said. “I can keep adding layers.”
Through her installations, Halsey honors the community that nurtures and inspires her – not only her mother, teacher or father as an accountant, but also the church, markets, bus route, relatives and community centers. It also documents a particular segment of society, glorifying a city language that is often undervalued or ignored.
At a time when many Black artists are known for figurative art, Halsey creates large-scale sculptures and reliefs. Although his installations refer to economic hardship, gentrification or gang violence, he conveys an explosive sense of joy.
“It’s not trying to expose concepts of racism, it’s just trying to celebrate the Darkness,” said artist Charles Gaines, who taught Halsey while he was an undergraduate at the California Institute of the Arts. “It tries to bring what is considered low culture, things that are the victim of a certain stereotype, into the field of art.”
Halsey has achieved acclaim and fame, which is rare for an artist who is only 34 years old. His work is already in the collections of major institutions such as the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
This year, he selected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for the prestigious roof garden commission, but deferred until next spring due to supply chain issues. (The roof will instead be used this summer as a place to sit and grab a bite, where local DJs host weekend dance parties.)
Halsey has become perhaps as well known for her activism as she is for her art. community center It started in LA, it became important food pantry during the pandemic and a policy of making sure that some of his art is sold to color collectors.
“Lauren is a builder—an art builder, a builder of objects, but also a community builder,” said Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum where Halsey resided in 2014. “In this truly powerful combination lies its profound significance.”
For the Kordansky show, Halsey created expansive sculptures filled with her collections on her neighborhood’s palette: hot pink, orange, green, yellow; painted boxes inspired by local signs and symbols; and what he calls the cave, including a functioning waterfall that he finally wants to bring back home for the kids to enjoy.
The neighborhood is clearly the fuel behind Halsey’s work, the collage of symbols she describes as her own form of place-making, such as battery or woven advertisements.
“All of this illuminates what’s in store,” Halsey said. “It is important to archive not only the name of the business, but also the painterly decisions they took to tell the neighborhood how they organized the minimarket.”
He pays tribute to the anonymous workers at local organizations who make a difference in people’s lives every day and describes them as “collaborators, the most brilliant community leader role models”. mentions Halsey Watt Sistersfor example, offering after-school programs and Vanessa’s Positive EnergyShe teaches dance lessons.
“From providing Easter baskets to food, karate, tickets, sports games and all educational support, folks do everything.” “The problem is the infrastructure that makes it so difficult to do the job. But work is being done,” he said.
“They are a pillar for me, a monument in themselves,” he added. “I work closely with them. I am lucky.”
The people who fill his life are his best friend’s mother from Mississippi or Franco Gaskin, aka “Great Franco” or “Picasso of Harlem”; He used to pass by on his way to the Studio Museum.
He described these personal references as inside jokes – “Oh, this reminds me of Sister Jenkins, ah, this is Sister Fritz, ah, this is Brother Washington,” Halsey said. “I’m going to go on these tangents over and over.”
Halsey plans to eventually bring the Met roof installation to South Central, which has been dubbed “the east side of the south central los angeles hieroglyphic prototype architecture (I).” The work invites visitors to explore the connections between ancient Egyptian symbolism, the utopian architecture of the 1960s, and contemporary visual iconography.
“I felt he had the tenacity, stamina and courage to deal with the organization in this way. Doris Salcedo tackles Tate; He took on the institution and everything it represented.” Sheena Wagstaff, the Met’s head of modern and contemporary art. I felt that Lauren had the ability to do that – by poking, probing.
Born in Los Angeles in 1987, Halsey initially wanted to be a professional basketball player and played Lady Vol. He was not hired, however, and enjoying making stage sets for church plays, he began taking architecture classes at a community college in Torrance, California. He later spent nearly a year studying architecture at the California College of the Arts, but was disappointed. the formulated nature of studio courses and plans for the cake in the sky.
“I can go crazy and do Disneyland, but that’s not real or where I’m from,” he said, “otherwise I would have seen it.”
Halsey transferred to CalArts in Santa Clarita and, after graduating in fine arts in 2012, earned a master’s degree from Yale University in 2014. “My initial reaction was sheer admiration,” said Golden, who saw Halsey’s work at CalArts.
“He was building a deep, deep vocabulary,” Golden added. “It was based on his biography, his sense of place, his sense of identity. Even at that first sight, it was clear to me that there was so much more.”
Halsey was fascinated by Kordansky’s work at Hammer’s “Made in LA” biennial in 2018. “Lauren is one of the most important contemporary artists to come out of Los Angeles, California in the last decade,” Kordansky said. “It documents where he was born, the society he lives in and his place of origin, but he does it with this extraordinary vision. Pedro Bell, which made all the early Parliamentary-Funkadelic records. Fantastic and visionary, it brushes against reality.”
Halsey has somehow managed to reconcile his commercial success with the more challenging world he came from – giving back a great deal. HE IS Summaeverythang The community center, which offers organic produce to Watts and South Central Los Angeles residents, aims to “enhance Black and Brown empowerment,” says its website, “personally, politically, economically, and socioculturally.”
“It would be crazy for me to do this work on South Central existing in a marketplace and not redistribute or recycle the rewards of this work to the neighborhood and the people who should benefit most from it,” he said. “I can achieve a lot in a sculpture, but this is not a syllabus, this is not a cooking program.”
He also said he didn’t see his neighborhood “through the lens of darkness or constant trauma.” Instead, Halsey said she saw her beauty and humanity: the fertile land that she continued to paint as an artist.
Halsey, artists Betye Saar, Overton Loyd, Mike Kelley, Dominik Moody and Mark Bradford. Ultimately, she said, for her, art is all about getting “deep or to the bones of what I care about,” as the singer and artist put it. George Clinton “It’s going for your dread,” he says.
But don’t ask him to explain exactly what funk means. “I wouldn’t describe it because once you defined it, it dies—you put it in the box, you flatten it,” Halsey said. “It’s an energy, a life force, something I chase after every day.”
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