The Collection

Lauren Halsey is a contemporary artist whose immersive installations and architectural sculptures celebrate and preserve the cultural identity of South Central Los Angeles, where her family has lived for generations. Combining handmade, found, and fabricated materials, her work bridges art, community activism, and visionary design. Drawing on local vernaculars—flyers, murals, signage, and tags—Halsey creates spaces that are at once celebratory archives of Black cultural expression and critical interventions addressing gentrification, systemic inequality, and displacement. Her maximalist, Afrofuturist aesthetic fuses community pride with ancient Egyptian iconography, funk, and utopian architectural concepts, producing environments that honor both the past and the possibility of a liberated future.

Halsey earned her BFA from California Institute of the Arts (2012) and MFA from Yale University (2014). Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at Serpentine Galleries, London (2024); Seattle Art Museum (2022); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018). She has also been featured in the Venice Biennale (2024), where her monumental outdoor installation keepers of the krown appeared in the central exhibition Foreigners Everywhere. In 2023, she created the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, incorporating portraits of friends, family, and community members into a monumental reinterpretation of Egyptian temple architecture.

Halsey’s work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Brooklyn Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Columbus Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), among others. She is the recipient of the Hammer Museum’s Mohn Award (2018) and the Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize (2021).

In 2020, she founded Summaeverythang Community Center, a South Central–based initiative that distributes organic produce and fosters empowerment in Black and Brown communities. She is currently developing sister dreamer, an expansive public sculpture park in South Central Los Angeles that will serve as both civic monument and community gathering space.