Women To Know: Lauren Halsey

The history of South Central, Los Angeles, is more than just the place where Lauren Halsey grew up; its robust culture is also a large influence in her work that celebrates the Black experience and how it has evolved throughout the decades in the community and penetrated by outside sources.

The Yale graduate’s artistic vision and work “creates immersive installations that bridge sculpture and architecture, and graphically maximalist collages that blend real and imagined geographies.”

Halsey amplifies the richness of Black culture in South Central by using local vernacular as a source of her work, through the use of “flyers, murals, signs, and tags—icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience.” 

Her art also speaks to the bigger picture plaguing the South Central community and other Black neighborhoods like it throughout the country, as she uses her art as “a form of creative resistance to the forces of gentrification.”

In addition to South Central inspiration, Halsey is “also inspired by the Afrofuturist aesthetics of funk music and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio, and “employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means of reclaiming lost legacies.”