Creating a “Hood” Pantone Chart with Lauren Halsey
Interview by Zito Madu | Photography by Arielle Bobb-Willis
Along with the title of artist, Lauren Halsey can be considered an anthropologist. Born in 1987, Halsey attended and graduated with her BFA from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and an MFA from Yale University in 2014. Her installations are often immersive, sometimes large, combining architecture, collage, sculpture, the real and the imagined, the present and the past, stretching as far back as ancient Egypt.
Her work, with its vivid hues, found and handmade items, not only challenges the conventions of fine art but does so through a particular and subjective experience. She makes art about her childhood and life in the Los Angeles (LA) neighbourhood of South Central. Her imagination is widened and deepened by the lives, colours, sounds and culture of her hometown, and she transfigures and transforms those materials into award-winning structures and installations that also serve as historical and contemporary documents about the struggles and joys of a neighbourhood.
By focusing on her subjective experience in this one small corner of the world, Halsey ironically ends up making incredible critiques about working class life, Black and queer life, poverty, disenfranchisement and gentrification. She masterfully accomplishes this feat without falling into the trap of losing the specific in the general, or overlooking the complex and complicated lives of individuals to make a greater social argument. Her work, first and foremost, is focused on the people who populate her art. The people who also act as her visible and invisible audience. She makes work about her people, for her people.
Left Lauren Halsey, Untitled, 2025. Gold leaf on steel and hand painted board 70 1/8 x 46 x 14 1/2 inches (178.1 x 116.8 x 36.8 cm) (IAPT 25.026). © Lauren Halsey, Courtesy of artist, Gagosian Gallery Photos: Allen Chen/SLH Studio. Right Lauren Halsey, Untitled, 2023. Acrylic, enamel, and CDs on acrylic and wood 86 1/2 x 64 1/8 x 36 inches (219.7 x 162.9 x 91.4 cm) (IAPT 23.040). © Lauren Halsey, Courtesy of artist, David Kordansky Gallery. Photos: Allen Chen/SLH Studio.
Zito Madu: A lot of your work centres around South Central, both in its current realities and from your childhood. Tell me about the experience of growing up there, and how your childhood has shaped and continues to shape your work?
Lauren Halsey: Family. A ton of play cousins and grandmothers, and folks that I inherited. It was a colourful palette. It was loud. South Central LA, of course, isn't just one thing. I experienced a lot of really cool aesthetic mixes, whether that was downtown South Central, North South Central, the east side of South Central, West South Central – I got all of it. But I think most black childhood experiences aren’t that different.
ZM: Something is fascinating to me about the way you transport South Central into all these prestigious spaces around the world. Your sculptural work takes up a lot of space. Some of the work is incredibly large and very visible. What is your thinking behind taking a pillar with your grandmother's face on it and standing it on the waterfront in Venice?
LH: My grandmother was one of my best friends and one of my first allies. I miss her deeply and think about her every day. And it's different for each figure that I could contextualise in that presentation and my relationship to them, but I thought how wonderful it could be to include her in the pantheon of the greatness that I care about. She's dead, and I wanted to hold her in good esteem. So, she's in Venice, but she's also in every single show that I present. Venice was the loudest because it was the Biennale, but she was in my first show at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), titled Lauren Halsey: we still here, there in 2018. She was in my Made in L.A. 2018 presentation at the Hammer Museum. She's in what we're working on now. She's in everything. I carry her and other people with me from work to work.
ZM: Your work is radical in many ways, and one way is that you're using materials often dismissed in fine art, and all these vibrant and loud colours. I read somewhere that you wanted to summon a world of funk. Why are these materials and colours so necessary to the world-building you're doing?
LH: I mean, it's like pre-funk. The palette of certain streets, certain main avenues and boulevards in South Central is exactly these colours. I'm just representing a ‘hood Pantone chart’. You know what I mean? I'm literally sampling a gradient; I'm recalling a relationship to colour that actually exists in the neighbourhood. As I make the same gesture, I think I'm contributing to the record and archive of some of the obvious things, like our signage and architecture, but I'm also doing that through colour. That's what it means to live here; that's what you see.
From the ethos of funk, colour is just a saturation. And we're not talking about funk, it's P-Funk [Parliament-Funkadelic]. I'm not an expert in funk music, but I am an expert in P-Funk. That sort of saturation, glossiness, shininess and dayglow is just part of the dreaminess of it all. That just conflates into a posture. For me, my relationship to colour is what it is, whether it's P-Funk or not.
ZM: I think that’s fascinating, because you're absolutely right; that is the way those kinds of worlds look. When I think of Miami, there's a distinct colour scheme associated with it. Even when I think about growing up in Detroit, there are very particular vibrant colours, like the way girls did their hair to the shoes that we wore.
LH: Exactly.
ZM: You mentioned that your grandmother was one of your heroes. However, I recall seeing images taken in your studio, where you used to display cutouts of other celebrities, family members and heroes. Most of them were from LA or the surrounding area. Who were those other heroes?
LH: I wonder who you saw.
ZM: I remember MC Eiht was one of them.
LH: Oh, yeah. I wouldn't say a hero, but up there. It changes. There is an artist whose name is Ramsess, and I'm actually going to represent him on the cladding of the sculpture I'm working on. He was my aunt's very close friend. My first memories of him are from seeing him in Leimert Park on Degnan [Boulevard], back when it had that hardcore activist vibe emanating from the uprisings in the early 1990s. He was selling beautiful images of Black people, contemporary individuals and historical figures on greeting cards, postcards, calendars, pens, buttons and even original artwork.
It was all in one: his tent was this space where you could access everything at once. Because of that, and because his marketplace was for everyone, it became part of my childhood. We always had a Ramsess calendar in the house, and many people I knew had the prints too. Looking back, I’m grateful I got to witness someone handling their career so naturally and beautifully. They were deeply local and accessible, but also had larger ambitions that didn’t conflict with the work. It was like the two existed side by side without stepping on each other.
ZM: Tell me about your experience at CalArts.
LH: At CalArts, you don't have a relationship with a college counsellor; you have your mentor. Mine was this painter, Anoka Faruqee, who, as soon as I got there, left for Yale. She told me there was this professor and practicing artist named Charles Gaines, who wanted to be my mentor. I was like, ‘Okay, sounds cool’, and then I'm hearing from everyone in school that he's hardcore, he's conceptual, he's not easy. No-one passes his classes. I'm like, ‘Damn, he chose me. I don't know nothing about anything’.
I wasn't able to intellectualise art, and I didn't think about it in the way that I do now. I was literally coming out of drawing 101 at El Camino Community College. And so I met him, and he's a very serious guy. I thought he was wonderful, but I had no idea it would lead to him literally carrying me and supporting me every day since then.
Shortly after that, he hired me to be his studio assistant – I think I was in the third year of CalArts at that time. It was my first job. I was a bus rider at the time but I didn't want to be late, so I asked my father to drop me off at work. And he was like, ‘Work? You got a job?’. I was like, ‘Yeah, with this guy, Charles Gaines’. He said, ‘You mean, drop you off to a man – What?’. And so he Yahoo'd Charles, and we saw him on the desktop together on the screen. I was like, ‘Oh shit. He's a famous artist’.
From that moment of first working with him, I noticed that you could professionalise a studio practice and take it very rigorously. At that point, I still didn't know what I was going to do with my degree if I graduated. So, when I got to school after he hired me independently, I knew exactly what I was working towards, which was the most incredible gift.
Leading up to now, with me not having the budget to finish my first show at MOCA [the Museum of Contemporary Art] and crying on the phone with him in my grandma's kitchen. And he says he'll do a solo deal with me, to pick up a cheque tomorrow and to finish – ensuring I would finish strongly.
He's like the father I wish my father were. My father sucks. Charles is incredible, both artistically and emotionally. He gave me my first real studio visit with [curators] Thelma Golden, Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Naima J. Keith and Lauren Haynes, when they were at Studio Museum in Harlem.
Lauren Halsey, keepers of the krown, 2024. Glass fiber reinforced concrete and mixed media 757 1/2 x 342 x 261 3/4 inches (1924.1 x 868.7 x 664.8 cm) (IAPT 24.016). © Lauren Halsey, Courtesy of artist, David Kordansky Gallery and Gagosian. Photos: Andrea Avezzù.
ZM: From my own experience, when someone that accomplished or knowledgeable sees you and pushes you, it’s because they believe you can do more than you realise in that moment.
LH: Ironically, it was all the white kids being haters, which I realised later. This guy tried to add me on Instagram, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, the nerve’. He was the main one who bullied me back then, telling me I could never handle Charles, saying he was too much for someone like me, especially since everyone knew I came from community college. But yeah, you’re totally right. He saw more in me than I saw in myself, and that’s what gave me the confidence to keep pushing and transcending. What a gift, right?
ZM: What has it been like travelling the world with your art, meeting all these people in places that would have shut you out if you hadn't achieved so much?
LH: I've become numb to it. I mean, it doesn't feel like anything. I don't get lost in the sauce because it's very difficult. And I keep my eyes on the prize. My dream, or my biggest aspiration, is to have a solo show at the Watts Towers Arts Center, under director Rosie Lee Hooks. That's the Venice Biennale for me. I have a meeting today to discuss hosting a show at Southwest College, which is located down the street from where I grew up. I went there for summer camp as a kid, and my mother went there. I'm working deeply on it right now – presenting a stage in front of my park.
I'm not saying I don't care. I'm grateful for the context, but it doesn't make my heart flutter. Usually, who I'm making the work for isn't in the room; that's who authenticates it for me, that's who it's for.
I'm working on this park right now. I've been working on it for 17 years, and it's scheduled to open in March 2026. It's not tethered to an institution, such as a museum, a gallery or an education department, which can be out of context. It's genuinely an autonomous effort to present this architecture within the context of a lush botanical garden with numerous water features, situated in the middle of the block. Imagine in the middle of 125th Street, just having this garden!
ZM: Can you talk about how your work is often viewed as counter to narratives about Black people in general? Your work also feels very subjective and local in terms of speaking to your own individual experience, whether that's your neighbourhood, your heroes or the places and things you've seen and been around.
LH: Because I'm doing it through my own ethos of funk.
ZM: It seems very important to you to maintain that singular identity, that subjectivity of your world, even as people try to generalise it.
LH: Because I'm not making it for them, that doesn't matter to me. Toni Morrison said... and I'm going to fuck up the quote, but basically she said, when you get the gaze out of your head, the whole world opens up, and it's a distraction.
Also, being in a white arts school like CalArts, I think me and this guy, Dane, also from South Central, were the only black kids in the program, and so I knew it would be impossible that they would understand what I'm talking about because I'm talking about San Pedro and 100 and Sixth Street. I'm talking about the Nickerson Gardens projects. So, in critique class, it made sense that there was an air of racism and arrogance, and ‘How dare you make work about you and your subjectivity’, which I just thought was insane.
Back to Toni Morrison – I don’t remember which interview it was, but she talked about how people would ask her if she was including Black people in her books. She said in different interviews, with different examples, you’d never ask a Russian writer if he was including Black people in his book. I don’t make my work with that in mind. I know who I make my work for.
In a 1975 Portland interview or speech – something I’ve listened to almost every day for years – she talks about who she’s speaking to when she writes. She brings up Sula and says she’s writing for the people in the book who won’t even pick it up – the non-readers. They’re the ones who justify it. They’re the ones you have to please. They make it authentic. They’ll tell you whether or not you’re really saying something. I feel the same. The park is exciting because it’s the first time I’ll have my real audience.
Zito Madu is a Nigerian-American writer and cultural critic based in Brooklyn.