LA artist Lauren Halsey's 'afrofuturistic, ancient and funky spaceship' has landed on the roof of the Met. The monumental and ambitious installation references ancient Egypt and south central Los Angeles.
Using 750 fiberglass-reinforced concrete tiles, the 35-year-old artist managed to construct a 7m-tall structure that resembles an Egyptian-style temple. Four large-scale sphinx statues - their faces portraits of Halsey's immediate family members and her life partner - serve as guardians, keeping watch outside the open space, which visitors can pass through.
Like the pyramids, the piece was designed with permanence in mind and will be transported across the country after the show, to a new home in south central Los Angeles, where Halsey lives and works. The artist hopes the sculpture will become a civic monument at her Summaeverythang community center, as well as a record of the place in the face of the increasingly encroaching forces of gentrification.
Delaying the installation that was first announced last March meant it "became more ambitious, more significant, more important," according to Met director Max Hollein, speaking at the exhibition's press presentation. The whitish cube and its freestanding columns loom over Central Park in an atmospheric haze.
The cube's walls are decorated with carved images taken from black-owned businesses, graffiti tags, and other street signs from Halsey's home in South Central Los Angles. There are protest signs, advertisements for black hairstyles, as well as images taken from objects from the Met's collection that mix the old with the present.
“It's a dense collage of phrases and images, all drawn from a local vernacular,” said Abraham Thomas, curator of modern architecture, design and decorative arts. He described the piece, titled “Eastside of South Central Los Angeles Architectural Prototype Hieroglyph (I),” as “an ancient, funkified, Afrofuturistic spaceship that just landed here at the Met.”
The tiles on this otherworldly vessel are reminiscent of the graffiti scribbled on the Met's Temple of Dendur, but also serve as a current archive of its own time and place, elevating the history of its local black community and celebrating the neighborhood's vitality.
“My installation for the Met's Roof Garden reflects my interest in combining contemporary narratives from south central Los Angeles with those evoked in ancient Pharaonic architecture,” Halsey said in a statement. “My hope is that viewers in New York will intuitively feel the connections.”