Inside Lauren Halsey’s Afrofuturist Temple on the Met Roof

Somewhere between a temple and an altar-like structure, Lauren Halsey’s latest commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop is her most ambitious to date. Halsey has reimagined ancient Egyptian symbols, such as sphinxes and pyramids, contextualizing them for today through the lens of Afrofuturism. The work also pays homage to South Central Los Angeles, where the artist lives and works. The result is a 22-foot-tall structure entitled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture, which resembles a place of worship.

At the entry of Halsey’s installation are four sphinx-like sculptures, each with a different face. This was a deliberate choice on the part of Halsey, who also incorporated some of her personal history into the piece––the four statues feature the faces of three of her family members and her partner. The installation consists of 750 glass fiber–reinforced concrete tiles (a signature material for the artist) that help create the walls of the temple-like structure. The four sphinxes (a motif that Kara Walker also played with in her monumental 2014 installation A Subtlety) line up to four pillars, each featuring a different face on its capital, as well as walls that create an open-roofed interior for the installation.

Halsey, who is 35, has developed a studio practice that is deeply interdisciplinary. Her approach seeks to preserve and uplift Black popular culture, while also considering the role of cities and the people who inhabit them. Rooted in community-building and architecture, Halsey’s work focuses on how spaces function and how people can activate them in new ways.

Halsey studied art at the California Institute of the Arts and then went on to receive an MFA from the Yale School of Art. From there, she went on to do a residency at the prestigious Studio Museum in Harlem. Over the last five years, the artist has also received major museum recognition, with shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. She was also featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2019.

This isn’t the first time that Halsey has worked in large-scale installation. For the 2018 edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition “Made in L.A.,” Halsey created a pavilion-esque temple located on the Lindbrook Terrace of the building that consisted of 600 hand-carved tiles featuring images of Black culture icons, businesses, and more. This installation was also a working prototype of a permanent building that would eventually be built in L.A. named the Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project. Her work often demonstrates her commitment to giving back to where she grew up: Halsey also founded Summaeverythang Community Center at the height of COVID, in an effort to deliver organic produce from Southern California farms to South Central L.A.

However, the Met rooftop commission now brings her work to a much wider audience. In the decade since the museum first began commissioning works for this high-rise open-air space, Halsey’s is one of the most ambitious to be featured. Originally scheduled to be unveiled last year, the commission had to be pushed back to make time for the larger logistics it entailed.

In making the work, Halsey immersed herself in the Met’s Egyptian collection, combining visual references into her temple-like installation. The sphinx sculptures flank the outside of the structure: Two placed on either side of the entrance seem to act as guards to the inside of the work. The installation is also inscribed with a multitude of symbols and drawings that refer to Black popular culture and the history and energy of L.A., while also making direct references to hieroglyphs, queerness, class, and graffiti. Phrases like “We are on a mission” and “Be ye whom ye are” are scrawled along the tiles of the walls in different fonts, as well as heads, faces, and close-ups of Afro hairstyles.

There are references to her home of South Compton, as well as Black-owned businesses, protest signs, hip-hop, and more. Working within this larger milieu, Halsey uses these symbols to deconstruct the space, critiquing the history of architecture and monuments that marginalized groups have historically been written out of.