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David Kordansky Gallery is proud to contribute to Frieze New York 2021's Tribute to the Vision & Justice Project and its founder, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. Now until May 14, through the duration of the fair and viewing room, our gallery will match up to $25,000 in donations to Summaeverythang Community Center, founded by Lauren Halsey.
Since spring 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Southern California, Halsey and volunteers have provided organic produce from regional farms and healthy, prepared food for free to neighbors in Watts and South Central Los Angeles. Please join us in supporting Halsey's project, soon celebrating its one year anniversary, and its inspiring example of how each of us can effect change by directly reaching out to the people around us.
CLICK HERE TO GIVE TO SUMMAEVERYTHANG COMMUNITY CENTER
Upon giving, please email your donation confirmation to donate@davidkordanskygallery.com.
We will gladly match donations received up to a total of $25,000 through Friday, May 14, 2021.
Summaeverythang Community Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. All donations are tax-deductible.
On the occasion of Frieze New York 2021, over 50 galleries and institutions have pledged support with contributions to the Tribute to the Vision & Justice Project. The full program is available here, and features digital events, artworks, institutional contributions, and special screenings.
The Vision & Justice Project is dedicated to examining art’s central role in understanding the relationship between race and citizenship in the United States. Rooted in the prescient thinking of Frederick Douglass, and his post-Civil War speech "Pictures & Progress," the project wrestles with the urgent question of how, in a democracy, the foundational right of representation and the right to be recognized justly, has historically—and is still—tied to the work of visual representation in the public realm. This work helps us to expand our visual literacy which in turn could alter the lens through which we see the world. To learn more, please visit visionandjustice.org.
Summaeverythang is a community center based in South Central Los Angeles dedicated to the empowerment and transcendence of Black and brown folks socio-politically, economically, intellectually, and artistically. Currently located next door to Lauren Halsey's artistic studio, the center serves as an extension and natural outgrowth of her art-related activities. In the studio, Halsey and her friends-and-family collaborators are building Afrofuturist fantasy architectures, recording and reimagining symbols and signs from the neighborhood, preserving representations of South Los Angeles, and celebrating them in a spectrum of materials, colors, and scales. Meanwhile, Summaeverythang is guaranteeing the fruition of that utopian vision by responding tangibly and flexibly to the immediate needs of the local community.
As just one timely example of the nourishing initiatives Halsey has in mind, for the past year, she has spearheaded a weekly program to distribute food, free of charge, to underserved residents of Watts, Crenshaw, and South Central. Recognizing the devastating local effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including unemployment and food insecurity, Halsey and her collaborators took action by developing—from scratch—systems to source, pack, and distribute now over 2,600 boxes of fresh, organic produce from Southern California farms each weekend. Ever-responding and evolving, Summaeverythang has recently pivoted to providing healthy hot meals on alternate Fridays. These logistical efforts cost upwards of $24,000 each week, and are funded exclusively through sales of Halsey’s art, grants, and the donations requested and matched here.
Week by week, the reach of Summaeverythang continues to grow, and future plans are being sown. On the horizon is a community “funk garden,” which will be a home to sculptures, as well as plantings that can regularly fill 100 produce boxes. Educational programs for youth, including lessons in dance, music, gardening, surfing, and Capoiera—all dreamt up before the pandemic—will be slated soon. A recording studio and an artist residency are also on the docket. The ambition across Summaeverythang is making lives better and more sustainable, especially as a counter to crucial issues disproportionately confronting people of color, queer populations, and the working class, such as gentrification, disenfranchisement, and unequal access to all sorts of opportunities. As Halsey recently shared with Ana Tuazon in the May 2021 issue of Frieze magazine, “As far as programming goes, the possibilities are infinite. No limits. As long as it’s about one’s transcendence, whatever that looks like, it can exist there.”
To learn more about Summaeverythang, please visit Summaeverythang.org, and read these articles from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Ocula, KCRW, ARTnews, and Frieze.
Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles) was awarded Seattle Art Museum’s 2021 Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the museum in February 2022. Other solo shows include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Banner Project (2021); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018). Halsey participated in Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018), where she was awarded the Mohn Award for artistic excellence. Her work is in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2020, she founded Summaeverythang Community Center and is currently in the process of developing a major public monument for construction in South Central Los Angeles. Her work will be the subject of a catalogue published by David Kordansky Gallery in 2022. Halsey lives and works in Los Angeles.
Photography + Videography by SLH STUDIO
Background imagery from Lauren Halsey, Little Lauren 2, 2020, acrylic, enamel, and metallic leaf on foam and wood, 60 x 52 x 30 inches (152.4 x 132.1 x 76.2 cm)
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