Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles) is rethinking the possibilities for art, architecture, and community engagement. She produces both standalone artworks and site-specific projects, particularly in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles where her family has lived for several generations. Combining found, fabricated, and handmade objects, Halsey’s work maintains a sense of civic urgency and free-flowing imagination, reflecting the lives of the people and places around her and addressing the crucial issues confronting people of color, queer populations, and the working class. Critiques of gentrification and disenfranchisement are accompanied by real-world proposals as well as celebration of on-the-ground aesthetics. Inspired by Afrofuturism and funk, as well as the signs and symbols that populate her local environments, Halsey creates a visionary form of culture that is at once radical and collaborative.

Halsey has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Serpentine, London, England (2024); Seattle Art Museum, WA (2022); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2018). Halsey presented monumental site-specific installations at Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024 and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden in 2023. Halsey is the 2021 recipient of the Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize and received the Mohn Award for artistic excellence at the Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. 2018 biennial. Recent group exhibitions include Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2024–2025); Reverberations, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2024); He Said/She Said: Contemporary Women Artists Interject, Dallas Museum of Art, TX (2023); The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2023); and Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2021). Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA. In 2020, Halsey founded Summaeverythang Community Center and is currently in the process of constructing sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles, a major public sculpture park in South Central Los Angeles. Halsey lives and works in Los Angeles.