Artist: Lauren Halsey

Gagosian presents an exhibition of new works by Lauren Halsey at the gallery’s Park & 75 location. The installation is composed of protruded engravings and a large-scale plaza sign sculpture—honoring the aesthetics of her home community in South Central Los Angeles and the diasporic, mythological features of Black life in the United States.

The six-foot-tall sculpture from the plaza sign series (2024–) pays homage to the iconography, color palettes, and creative wordplay commonly found on Black- and Brown-owned business signage in working-class neighborhoods. Whereas signs like “Watts Happening” are tributes to artist- and community-run cultural centers, others like “Dreams and Things” and “Sisters Serving the Community” are a call to action and a reminder of the historic and current roles that community members and institutions play in stewarding Black and Brown neighborhoods amid conditions of economic inequality, systemic racism, state violence, gentrification, and displacement.

The monochrome sculptural reliefs in the protruded engravings series (2022–), on the other hand, assemble a historical, contemporary, and mythical graphic record of Black culture in Los Angeles. Like the cosmological carvings of ancient Egypt and Mesoamerican civilizations, Halsey’s engravings appear almost hieroglyphic, transforming South Central residents, institutions, and everyday moments into ciphers that illuminate alternative constructions of the past, present, and future. She places their expressive cultures and community designs into a dynamic exchange with Afro-diasporic mythologies, Funk music and aesthetics, personal memory, and collective history.

“These works grow out of my desire to create a vocabulary and practice that exists somewhere beyond celebration and preservation,” Halsey explains. “They represent my dreamscape for a plaza and my yearning to create a unique portrait of a place. I celebrate how color, text, and informal language are used in my neighborhood to articulate the promise of a business or community institution. The artwork also expresses gratitude to the brilliant hands and energy that create these messages and aesthetic. Los Angeles is one point of reference in this work,” she continues. “But it also speaks to the symbols, poetics, and cultural environment that I experienced during my years living in Harlem. It was there that I began developing certain aspects of my approach, most especially as it relates to carving. It feels serendipitous to reintroduce it at Gagosian’s location in upper Manhattan.”

The installation at Park & 75 offers a portal into Halsey’s world-building practice. It also builds on concepts from the artist’s recent projects, most notably the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2023), her site-specific installation on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden, and sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles, a sculpture park and garden that will open in Los Angeles in spring 2026.