Based in South Central Los Angeles, where her family has lived for generations, Lauren Halsey creates immersive installations that bridge sculpture and architecture, and graphically maximalist collages that blend real and imagined geographies. She recontextualizes and reinterprets local vernacular sources such as flyers, murals, signs, and tags—icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, Halsey’s work offers a form of creative resistance to the forces of gentrification. In addition to the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, the artist employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means of reclaiming lost legacies. She is also inspired by the Afrofuturist aesthetics of funk music and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio.

Lauren Halsey was born in 1987. She lives and works in Los Angeles.