Lauren Halsey’s newest works at Gagosian Park & 75, opening November 14, invite viewers into a world where South Central Los Angeles, diasporic mythologies, and community memory collide. The installation combines protruded engravings and a monumental plaza sign sculpture, both steeped in the textures, colours, and wordplay of Black- and Brown-owned neighborhood businesses.

The centerpiece, a six-foot-tall plaza sign sculpture (2024–), reads like a map of lived experience. Names such as Watts Happening nod to artist- and community-run cultural centers, while Dreams and Things and Sisters Serving the Community function as both homage and call to action. Halsey’s work reminds us that these neighborhoods are not passive backdrops, they are forged by the labour and resilience of their communities, even in the face of gentrification, economic precarity, and systemic inequality.

Halsey’s protruded engravings (2022–) expand this vision into a hieroglyphic-like language. Borrowing the cosmic logic of ancient Egyptian and Mesoamerican carvings, she transforms everyday moments, local institutions, and South Central residents into symbols of myth. Funk aesthetics, Afro-diasporic storytelling, and personal recollection weave together.

“These works grow out of my desire to create a vocabulary that exists beyond celebration and preservation,” Halsey says. “They’re my dreamscape for a plaza, a portrait of a place shaped by color, text, and informal language. Los Angeles is central, but Harlem shaped how I think about carving, history, and community.”

This exhibition continues threads from her recent projects, from the Eastside of South Central Los Angeles Hieroglyph Prototype Architecture (2023) to her Metropolitan Museum Roof Garden installation, and points toward Sister Dreamer, her sculpture park and garden opening in Los Angeles in 2026. She also presented the first exhibition in the UK at Serpentine. This year, Gagosian honoured the artist in their Frieze London booth.

In Halsey’s hands, signage, community gestures, and architectural forms become more than aesthetics. They are living, breathing chronicles of Black and Brown life.

–

Image: Lauren Halsey, LODA PLAZA II, 2025. Gold leaf on steel and hand painted board, 72 x 46 x 14 inches (182.9 x 116.8 x 35.6 cm) © Lauren Halsey. Photo: Allen Chen. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.