a pharaonic temple merging ancient Egypt with Los Angeles

Some artists make such electric debuts that they illuminate an uncharted space in your mind. Think Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982 or Matthew Barney a decade later. Last year’s breakout star was Lauren Halsey, whose inaugural exhibition for the Chelsea outpost of the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles excited all corners of the New York art world. . Now, just a year later, Angeleno, 35, has reached his pinnacle, namely the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s tenth annual rooftop garden commission.

“Lauren is a one-of-a-kind artist,” Kordansky boasted at the April 17 opening of the exhibit. “She’s amazing,” said Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan, one of Halsey’s hometown supporters to make the trip. “Amazing!” confirmed artist Mark Bradford, a friend and sometimes mentor. In other words. Halsey’s installation atop the Met is a triumph of public sculpture: a 22-foot-tall modernist pharaonic temple that links Afrofuturism to the museum’s Hatshepsut, it’s flanked by four inscribed columns and guarded by four sphinxes royals.

For all its welcome, the Met rooftop is a difficult space for an artist to command. Its sweeping views of the city skyline and Central Park don’t really need improving. Even the monumental sculptures there can seem small, and the installations of many objects can get lost in the crowd of visitors, an unlikely proposition this time around. In fact, the temple is visible from the ground in the park.

Monumental in every way

“This is the best rooftop show since Big Bambooobserved a guest, referring to the giant, climbing bamboo nest erected in 2010 by the Starn Twins for a rooftop series that preceded the commissioned shows. I asked Mike Starn what he thought about it. “It fills the space with grace and gravity,” he replied, gazing at Halsey’s gypsum-toned monument to urban blackness, which dates back to antiquity while documenting the present. “And it speaks to the humanity of the city, and especially the people who have been marginalized by this museum for so long.”

Exactly. Speaking for me, a white person who has been sickened by racial divisions in America throughout her life, Halsey’s celebration of community is an equalizing joy. And if she’s talking about one thing, it’s community.

Composed of 750 fiber-reinforced and titled concrete slabs the east side of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (l), the walls of the Halsey Pavilion, inside and out, are covered in hand-sculpted collages of signage, cars, graffiti and funk/hip-hop music that contribute to the visual culture and hearing of the neighborhood where the artist grew up and still lives. The faces carved into the column capitals represent Halsey’s neighbours; those of the sphinxes represent his immediate family, but they also bear witness to human history. This is what makes his project so inclusive. It is minimalist architecture as maximalist social commentary. And that’s genius.

Halsey studied architecture at community college before moving on to fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts and Yale University. Since her residency in 2015 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she has exhibited her work there in a collective exhibition. Since then she has been unstoppable, exhibiting solo and in groups, while one museum after another has added her to their collections. In 2018, first prize at the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennale went to his installation, some elements of which anticipated his current work at the Met. In 2019 she won the Frieze New York Artist Award and in 2021 the Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence Prize at the Seattle Art Museum.

“It was Lauren’s journey as an architect that made me think of her,” said Sheena Wagstaff, the Met’s former head of modern and contemporary art and initial curator of Halsey’s project. (Abraham Thomas, Curator of Modern Architecture and Design, oversaw it.) “The set is extraordinary, but,” Wagstaff said, “I think Lauren tested this institution more than any other artist with whom I’ve worked, except for Doris Salcedo at the Tate. Modern, but that’s what she should be doing and why we’re here. A week after the glamorous opening of Cecily Brown’s masterful exhibition, Death and the Maidthe Grand Old Met is absolutely on fire.

Just like Halsey. During the Covid 2020 lockdown, she founded – and funded – the Summaeverythang Community Center so that black and brown residents of the South Central and Watts neighborhoods in Los Angeles are supplied with fresh food. Managed by volunteers, it is still in operation.

This puts her in a league with other artists who have dedicated themselves to public service outside of the art world – for example, Theaster Gates and his salvage projects in Chicago, Rick Lowe’s Project Row homes in Houston and For Freedoms by Hank Willis Thomas. All are black. In New York, you have to go back to the pre-gentrification and high-risk 1970s to find white artists doing the same.

“Where I’m from,” Halsey told me, “just serve. You have to.”

• The Hanging Gardens Commission: Lauren Halsey, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until October 22