Bringing LA to NY

Lauren Halsey’s solo show at the David Kordansky Gallery opened on May 6 to broad acclaim, including a cover article in the Arts section of the New York Times. Halsey, who is from South Central Los Angeles, works with visual markers of everyday Black life, e.g., food, hair, businesses, social exchanges, religion. Incorporated into sculptural collages, these signifiers recast the architecture of her familial neighborhood in a different light. Halsey’s collages document this iconography at a time of potential loss due to gentrification and its homogenizing trends; in this way, they have something in common with projects such as Black Archives and the Instagram account @hoodmidcenturymodern. But Halsey’s art moves beyond documentation by melding the quotidian imagery of a Black neighborhood with references to Ancient Egypt and Afrofuturism. Moreover, she recently opened the Summaeverythang community center there as a space to “develop Black and Brown empowerment: personal, political, economic, and sociocultural.”

While impressive in its breadth and ambition, the show is not as immersive or architectural as her previous one at the Hammer Museum, where the walls and floors were covered with gypsum engraved with hieroglyphs of Black life, or at MOCA, where Halsey transformed the white-walled gallery into a cave-like space with enclaves that nestled sculptures. By contrast, the white walls of the Kordansky Gallery are very present. The standalone sculptures and wall panels are a sampling of Halsey’s previous work and effectively act as a teaser to her long-anticipated installation on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (postponed to next spring).