Lauren Halsey takes a non-linear approach to time. “I’m always conflating the past and the present with aspirations for a transcendent future, no matter what it is I make,” the artist told Dazed. What she makes, immersive installations that bridge sculpture and architecture, has travelled from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Serpentine in London. But her latest installation, Sister Dreamer, may be one of her most personal projects yet – it’s an ode to her birthplace, where her family has lived for generations, situated in the very place that her distinct visual language is rooted in, South Central Los Angeles.
Sister Dreamer, more specifically, is an ode to the “surge ‘n’ splurge” of South Central. By that, Halsey explains that she means her community’s maximalism and excess. “I’m really interested in a certain level of density of maximalism that might be perceived as chaotic, but is perfectly in order,” she says. “When you happen upon the compositions, there’s this too muchness that is meant to hold you in them as you code and read through images and text.” And there is plenty to take in. When you enter from Western Avenue, there’s a dramatic procession into the centrepiece, a cube, passing a corridor of eight sphinxes and Hathoric columns, each carved with portraits of the artist’s family, friends and heroes and functioning as spiritual protectors of the space.
With Sister Dreamer, Lauren presents the people who guided her back to themselves. In the face of gentrification, it’s not just a monument honouring those people; it will be actively in service to the community they came from. Halsey’s nonprofit Summaeverythang Community Center will oversee public programming for the site. Ahead of the opening (and street fair), we spoke to Halsey about vacant lots, ice cream, Egyptology and spaces that transcend time.
Congrats on Sister Dreamer! Could you tell me about where the idea came from?
Lauren Halsey: When I graduated from high school, and I started attending a local community college in LA, I was taking the architecture program with the art program simultaneously. At the same time, I was an avid bus rider. I’ve never driven, really, and so, at the time, Western Avenue was filled with these vacant lots. I started thinking very aspirationally about building in these spaces. I just had a list of lots that I wanted to appropriate as these sites of joy, that could potentially be a garden, a plaza, a pavilion, a structure of some sort. Sister Dreamer was a former ice cream shop that I would spend time at with my friends as a kid.
What are the memories that you have of that ice cream shop?
Lauren Halsey: My core memories of that site were it being a site of community, love, fun and joy. I thought poetically it made sense to present something that exists in that same vein. And it’s the most perfect corner parcel. You get to see the elevation. And you can approach it from all coordinates: northwest, east, and south.
You and your family have a long history in South Central LA. How did that inform the installation?
Lauren Halsey: The concept of the project is that it is an architecture that pays homage to a South Central history beginning in 1921, or 1922, when they came via the Great Migration. The cladding, the columns, the sphinxes, all of it honours our businesses, our pageantry, our material culture, our knick-knacks, our car culture, our fashion, our aesthetic. There’s a pantheon of Black historical heroes, leaders that are so important to our history, but there’s also a pantheon of hyperlocal leaders who have also sustained the sort of genius in the neighbourhood that I wanted to honour and who are still doing the work right now. It’s an ode to those folks as well, both the living and those who have passed. I wanted folks to see themselves in it and be like, ‘Oh, yo, that’s so-and-so from around the corner’.
What about the materials? How did it come together?
Lauren Halsey: The chef doesn’t give up the recipe, but I will say that, not being an architect with a capital ‘A’, I spent deep time on YouTube just watching videos on how certain buildings and institutions were made. I came across how the Broad Museum was made downtown, and it literally was a how-to video on creating the cladding. In watching the process, I thought my studio could adapt that process as well as casting and glass fibre reinforced cement.
Your work is always research-heavy. What else were you looking at or exploring in the process?
Lauren Halsey: I was knee deep in archives of all textures: familial ones that are informal and amazing research archives from libraries in the neighbourhood. Also, institutional archives online. There’s everything in this from our ephemera, flyers, signage, and material culture. I was thinking of the things that we make with our hands to language around some of the festivals that were happening post-civil rights, and trying to summon that in an image pictorially. It’s literally a little bit of everything. It’s the micro and macro pulling in and pulling out.
What about the references to Egyptology? That’s a running theme in your work!
Lauren Halsey: To make a really, really, really long story short, I grew up with a father who was this sort of idiosyncratic Egyptologist who was testifying on the pyramids and pharaohs and remixing it to speak into power into our ancestry and our bloodline. Having existed as Black folks in this country and not doing the sort of DNA testing that links you back to our origin story, my father’s way to assert esteem and pride for himself, my brother, me, and my mother, was these studies, from the likes of Lorraine O’Grady. As opposed to linking our bodies towards the violence of the slave trade, she would merge us into the context of Pharaohs so that we would take on this royal headspace. When I moved to Harlem in 2014, I realised this wasn’t just my father’s thing, it is a Black thing. We obviously weren’t all pharaohs, and I’m not an Egyptologist, but it’s using the language to speak power into a community.
Who do the sphinxes in Sister Dreamer represent?
Lauren Halsey: People I love dearly. My mother, brother, grandma who passed, my girlfriend, a couple of cousins, and one of my heroes, Robin Daniels of Sisters of Watts.
You’ve previously said that people make a neighbourhood a neighbourhood. How do you hope people engage in the space?
Lauren Halsey: The park will exist and function at no cost to the community, ever. It’s open from sunrise to sunset, so come ponder, sit, chill and read. Programming-wise, we’re working towards an ambitious program calendar with the pillars of education and wellness. We’re hitting the ground running with everything from academic support, like drop-in tutoring, to sound baths and comedic yoga. There will also be jazz nights, game nights and film screenings, so I get to wear all these hats. One week I’m working as a promoter, getting flyers out and putting up signs, but then the next week I’m booking shows. It’s a maximalist endeavour! And the programming is what’s going to animate it and hold people there.
People talk a lot about today’s loneliness epidemic. What role do you believe public spaces play in community-building?
Lauren Halsey: They’re everything, especially when they’re free. It democratises the way folks are in community. The takeaway for Sister Dreamer is to be in an oasis with folks in a shared safe space because, otherwise, we don’t really have that over here.
Sister Dreamer is situated at 76th Street and Western Avenue, South Central Los Angeles and will run from March 14 2026 until September 2027.
