News / Lauren Halsey

Just Opened

Lauren Halsey in
60th Biennale di Venezia: Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere

Through November 24, 2024
Giardini and Arsenale, Venice
www.labiennale.org

Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa for the 60th Biennale di Venezia, takes its title from a series of neon sculptures by the artist collective Claire Fontaine that depict the words “Foreigners Everywhere” in different colors and languages. The phrase comes from the Turin collective Stranieri Ovunque, which fought racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s. Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere focuses on artists who are themselves “foreigners” and on the production of other related subjects: the queer artist, who has moved within sexualities and genders; the outsider artist, located at the margins of the art world; as well as the indigenous artist, frequently treated as a foreigner in their own land. Work by Lauren Halsey is included.

On View

Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage

Through May 12, 2024
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
www.mfah.org

Multiplicity presents over eighty major collage and collage-informed works by fifty-two living artists. The works reflect the breadth and complexity of Black identity, exploring diverse conceptual concerns such as cultural hybridity, notions of beauty, gender fluidity, and historical memory. From paper, photographs, fabric, and salvaged or repurposed materials, these artists create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives within our fragmented society. This exhibition originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Work by Derrick Adams, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe is included.

Opening Soon

Lauren Halsey

October 4, 2024–January 5, 2025
Serpentine, London
www.serpentinegalleries.org

Lauren Halsey is the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in the United Kingdom. Halsey’s wide-ranging practice is deeply rooted in the neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles in which her family has lived for generations. Making immersive installations and stand-alone objects, Halsey archives and remixes the changing signs and symbols populating her environment, offering a celebration of the community’s vitality and a creative form of resistance to its growing gentrification.

Closed

Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage

September 15–December 31, 2023
Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee
fristartmuseum.org

Multiplicity presents over eighty major collage and collage-informed works by fifty-two living artists. The works reflect the breadth and complexity of Black identity, exploring diverse conceptual concerns such as cultural hybridity, notions of beauty, gender fluidity, and historical memory. From paper, photographs, fabric, and salvaged or repurposed materials, these artists create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives within our fragmented society. Work by Derrick Adams, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe is included.

Closed

Lauren Halsey
The Roof Garden Commission

April 18–October 22, 2023
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
www.metmuseum.org

Lauren Halsey’s the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022) is the tenth commission to be featured on the Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. The full-scale architectural structure is imbued with the collective energy and imagination of the South Central Los Angeles community where Halsey was born and continues to work. Visitors are able to enter and walk around the installation to explore its connections to sources as varied as ancient Egyptian symbolism, 1960s utopian architecture, and contemporary visual expressions such as tagging that reflect the ways in which people aspire to make public places their own.

Closed

Black American Portraits

February 8–June 30, 2023
Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta
museum.spelman.edu

Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, Black American Portraits reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Spanning more than two centuries from circa 1800 to the present day, this selection of approximately 140 works draws primarily from LACMA’s permanent collection and chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community, and exuberance. This exhibition has traveled from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Work by Lauren Halsey, Titus Kaphar and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

Closed

Spotlight
Lauren Halsey

May 6–June 3, 2023
FLAG Art Foundation, New York
www.flagartfoundation.org

Lauren Halsey’s portal hoppin hood poppin (2023) is accompanied by a text by historian Robin D. G. Kelley as part of the FLAG Art Foundation’s Spotlight series. Pairing a new or never-before-exhibited artwork with a commissioned piece of writing, the series aims to create focused and thoughtful dialogues between artists and critics, poets, or scholars.

Closed

Lauren Halsey

February 4–July 17, 2022
Seattle Art Museum
www.seattleartmuseum.org

This exhibition presents works by Lauren Halsey in which proud declarations of Black-owned businesses intermingle with images of Egyptian pyramids, the Sphinx, and pharaohs and queens, all drawn from a personal archive the artist has developed through research and community interactions. Carved gypsum reliefs on the perimeter of the gallery suggest temple walls, while the boxes stacked in a large-scale central sculpture are metaphorical building blocks for future architecture, resonating with imagery from the present. The exhibition is organized on the occasion of the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, which Halsey won in 2021.

Closed

The Banner Project
Lauren Halsey

May 29, 2021–June 5, 2022
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
www.mfa.org

Commissioned to create banners for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Lauren Halsey remixes signs, symbols, and Afrofuturist visions inspired by the visual vernacular of her neighborhood, including posters, advertising, and tags. She juxtaposes these with works from the ancient cultures of Egypt and Nubia that she selected from the museum’s collection, taking inspiration as well from the aesthetic output of the Italian speculative architecture collective Superstudio and the music collective Parliament-Funkadelic.

Closed

Black American Portraits

November 7, 2021–April 17, 2022
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
www.lacma.org

Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, and complementing the presentation at lacma of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, Black American Portraits reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Spanning more than two centuries from circa 1800 to the present day, this selection of approximately 140 works draws primarily from lacma’s permanent collection and chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community, and exuberance. Work by Lauren Halsey, Titus Kaphar and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

Closed

Lauren Halsey in
Made in L.A. 2018

June 3–September 2, 2018
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
hammer.ucla.edu

Made in L.A. is a biennial exhibition showcasing artists from the greater Los Angeles area. The 2018 iteration features work by thirty-two artists whose ages range from twenty-nine to ninety-seven, who have contributed works that are deeply engaged with vital aspects of contemporary culture. Through drawings, paintings, sculpture, textiles, performance, video, photography, and installations—many newly commissioned expressly for Made in L.A. 2018—these artists exemplify the diverse and creative landscape of Los Angeles today. Work by Lauren Halsey is included.