Lauren Halsey: Emajendat

The artist's important work centers the on Black community, both aesthetically and materially. Halsey gathers icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience from local vernacular sources recontextualizing and reinterpreting them for her utopic fantasies of the city. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, her work--which includes wall works, massive multiroom installations, and immersive outdoor environments--is a potent reminder of the importance of community and home.

Beyond the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, Halsey employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means to reclaim lost legacies, drawing inspiration from Afrofuturism--a transcultural movement blending science fiction with aspects of Black art and culture--and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio.