Lauren Halsey’s
Generational Currents

I have always known that I can’t bifurcate a record of service with the production of sculptures and the architectural vision for my sculptures. I have to somehow take it back to the street. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and I feel like I’m getting closer to that. I’m super excited about building structures, sculptures, moments that are animated by the Black and brown public, and are multifunctional.

It’s about figuring out new paradigms to funkify how I envisioned spaces existing in South Central, and summoning total new functions for those spaces specific to my audience. That’s what I want my sculptures to do now. I want them to live in those sorts of conditions, not just to be seen and viewed and walked through, critiqued, and then come down.

Her voice is always in my head. In so many lectures, so many essays, [she says] that once you get the gaze out of your head, the world opens up. And that just became praxis for no matter what I was doing very early on. That the baggage of all of the mess wouldn’t affect my labor, my rhythm, or the poetics. And that’s where funk comes [in], because funk’s your own reward. You do it anyway.

The freedom of funk, the possibility, just allows you to be on the one with yourself, and on the one of your funkentelechy. It’s a rhythm that’s yours. And that, coupled with [Toni Morrison’s] voice, coupled with Ms. Lauryn Hill, and then other more aesthetic leaders that I look to, who just didn’t give a fuck and just went for it, that was and is still the foundation.

When the shutdown hit, I realized, “Oh, shit. This is a thing.” And South Central was already—especially the East Side—in a hunger crisis pre-corona, already so oppressed, so neglected, and bureaucracy wasn’t doing anything then.

I thought how tight it could be if I could subvert the food supply chain, and go straight to the best farmer’s market in the country, reach out somehow to all of the local county’s farmers, and bring in the most beautiful, gorgeous, nutrient-dense produce at no cost to folks in the neighborhood.

The first two weeks we messed up a lot. We had no idea what we were doing. It was a mess. I don’t know that I consciously was thinking, “Toni Morrison says to keep moving,” but it’s just in my bones at this point. I believe it, and I believe in her, I believe in my team and I’ve seen the results. So, we’ve just been moving. Thirty-five or so weeks later, we’ve become experts. We’re trying to grow it now, but we’re doing it in doses, because I don’t want to exhaust everybody. It’s been beautiful.

If I were a painter, it would be different. If I were creating photographs, it would be different. But because I take on these intense—on purpose—maximalist-scale installations, it takes people. And I knew [that] very early on, when I made the float for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in 2016—that happened very organically when my friends jumped into help. None of them had an interest prior to that moment. They’re rappers, some are hustlers. One was a truck driver. They just saw me in need and because they love me they asked, “How can I help?”

That was the perfect recipe. And it was the most soulful interaction for art making that I could engage with. When friends become involved and families become involved, they're also doing it from a lens of their South Central, and the South Central history and being involved in a certain era, loving a certain palette, sometimes different from mine, sometimes the same. When that happens and I bring all of that energy together, the work just opens up, it becomes a total experience.

I think that’s incredibly important as far as making authentic, well-rounded, but also open-ended, portraits and representations of a place. To have my grandmother, who was around in the 30s and the 40s kickin it on Central Avenue, having her hand in the work, having my eight-year-old cousin’s hand in the work, my friends who are Black men in South Central—when that happens, it belongs to all of us, and that’s important to me. There’s just this love of togetherness that happens with having a creative studio that brings in everybody, whether they have the “expertise” of artmaking or not.

I think it’s easier because I’m from here and I’m making work here. My studio and community center are three blocks away from where we all grew up. My parents still live there. Doing it at home makes it just so comfortable and easy. Though, the work is not easy. It’s incredibly difficult and laborious, but fun.

Both maternal and paternal sides landed here via the Great Migration, so to just inherit so much stuff as far as narrative, history, images, attitudes, myths, pride, literal stuff, ephemera, and living a life of service in downtown South Central where we live, it’s everything.

My grandmother opened up her home to me when I was at CalArts, and I lived in her garage, and she allowed me to sort of make it my own portal. Then, she allowed me to make my MOCA show in the backyard. It was trippy doing that maybe one mile away from the Watts towers, and thinking about monumentality and “sky's the limit” and building up, building tall, and having that support from her while also building the sculptures with 20 people in the backyard.

I come from a very working-class experience. A very beautiful experience as far as family, but I couldn’t keep asking my mom and my grandma and my father and my aunt and my uncle, “Can I get $20 to go to Home Depot?” It just got played out very quick. I realized that to reach my desired scale, I would have to have some structure that allowed me to professionalize my work, so I wasn’t just making stuff and putting it under my bed. I realized that I had to monetize—while still maintaining a sense of autonomy and integrity and being able to sleep at night—my practice a bit so that I can also create and sustain the sort of social programs I’m interested in, like having a community center that is self-directed and self-funded by me and my friends. It would be impossible otherwise.

As far as making that show, I wanted to make a work that paid homage to my paternal grandmother, who was one of those people who gave me her last $12 to do something or take the bus somewhere, and never got to see a show from me because she passed when I first got to CalArts. That show was a dedication to her Los Angeles life that she loved very much.

I have dreams of one day creating some sort of community land trust situation, where we’re able to create the types of wild architectures I would want to experience and live in as a shelter. Where we’re able to create powerful artworks for the neighborhood's sculpture garden. Where we’re able to create gorgeous grottoes to hold our archives, but also our own gardens, recreational and self-directed educational spaces for our nourishment.