On the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, four sphinxes cast their gaze over the New York skyline in artist Lauren Halsey’s installation titled “The Eastside of South Central Los Angeles Hieroglyph Prototype Architecture (I)” ( 2022). To get there, visitors meander through the halls of the Met, past Renaissance sculptures and medieval triptychs, before boarding the elevator that takes them to the highest level. The ancient Egyptian-inspired rooftop installation reflects the historic fixations visitors passed on as they climbed up, but closer examination reveals the project is hyper-specific to South Central Los Angeles, the predominantly black neighborhood where Halsey grew up and lives now.
The monumental artwork is made of 750 fiberglass and concrete tiles and includes a 22-foot-tall roofless temple, four sphinxes (with faces of people Halsey knows in South Central Los Angeles , including his mother and brother), four columns and four “tombs.” (Los Angeles Hammer Museum exhibited a smaller version of the work in 2018.)
Halsey’s sculptures are etched with references to her neighborhood. Sometimes the artist sculpts images drawn from ancient Egyptian iconography, but most of the designs include things heard and seen around South Central LA: images of street signs, local idioms, shops and popular brand names, and even the back of people’s heads. Words with universal resonance, such as “reflections”, “constructed autonomy” and “solidarity”, also appear.
From one corner of the roof, visitors can see the 220-ton ancient Egyptian monolith known as “Needle of Cleopatra(circa 1425 BC) on the edge of Central Park. The rest of the green space extends in another direction, and the rooftop terraces of the wealthy Upper East Siders face the Halsey settlement from another.
Each of the artist’s sculptures is an austere off-white and stands on a stage-like platform in the same color. The imposing installation looks like it should be guarded by red velvet museum ropes, but instead people can walk through it and examine the works up close.
On the ground floor of the famous “Temple of Dendur(10 BCE), a man named Leonardo carved his name into the sandstone wall over 200 years ago. Now that random act and name is immortalized. On the roof, some of Halsey’s carvings are designed in stylized letters to look like quickly executed labels; others seem meticulously planned. The work seems to consider the permanence of neighborhoods and cultures. Back in Los Angeles, South Central is rapidly gentrifying.
The installation is more futuristic and fantastical than strictly commemorative of ancient Egypt. Its design is inspired Afrofuturism and the utopian aesthetic of the 1960s. In Halsey’s project, South Central LA was immortalized, as were the cultures that created the 2,000-year-old artworks four stories below. It poses a larger question both about the Met’s collection and the New York neighborhoods it examines: what will last? Who decides what to keep?
Once the artwork leaves the Met in October, it will be moved to a community art space in South Central LA.
