“The Roof Garden Commission: Lauren Halsey”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This event has ended.

Lauren Halsey has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to create a site-specific installation for its Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. The installation will be accompanied by a catalogue. In a prominent review by Holland Cotter in The New York Times, Cotter describes Halsey’s monumental installation as “one of the best in the Met’s 10-year series of annual Roof Garden commissions.” Cotter continues, “In conceiving it, she has evoked ancient forms found in the Met’s Egyptian collection. She has conjured up the Pharaonic funk and empyreal jazz of George Clinton and Sun Ra. And she has streamed in, hot from the street, the urban culture of the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where she grew up and where she still lives. Finally, she has encapsulated all this richness in a 22-foot-high architectural cube, creating a kind of space station/sanctuary, open to the sky and to spectacular views of the city and Central Park.”

Opening tomorrow, April 18, Halsey’s monumental, full-scale architectural structure is imbued with the collective energy and imagination of the South Central Los Angeles community where the artist was born and continues to work. Titled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), the installation is designed to be inhabited by The Met’s visitors, who will be able to explore its connections to sources as varied as ancient Egyptian symbolism, 1960s utopian architecture, and contemporary visual expressions that reflect the ways in which people aspire to make public places their own.