Put this woman in charge of the Olympics opening ceremony, like right now, today.
Transforming the iconic stage and grounds of the Hollywood Bowl into a sprawling monument to civic imagination, multidisciplinary artist Lauren Halsey reconfigured not only the amphitheater’s shell but its energetic frequency as well. Her vision for emajendat—an immersive terrain of maximalist splendor more like an opera than a concert—while driven by collaboration and composed of hundreds of interdisciplinary elements and more than one superstar, represented one woman’s singular, self-possessed artistic vision.
Halsey’s visual art lexicon is built on two parallel modalities. The first is her regal, beguiling urban hieroglyphics—architecturally scaled sculptures which perfectly channel ancient Egyptian cuneiform and plasters, but chronicle the lives of people in her community with the reverence once reserved for far-off gods and pharaohs. This aspect of her practice has wowed global audiences from the Hammer to the Met and LACMA, and has most recently been permanently enshrined at her Sister Dreamer public sculpture park in the heart of her beloved South Central neighborhood.
The other side of Halsey’s artistry enacts a hyperchromatic world-building, drawing from South Central’s vernacular architecture and street-culture iconography—home to her summaeverythang mutual aid center since the pandemic—to forge somatic objects of soulful maximalism and contagious joy. That is the vibrant energy she brought front and center to the Bowl in late September. From the extensive pre-concert activations including hand-carved and brightly painted statuary and signage, cozy Afrofuturist self-stations, roller skating, and Los Angeles landmark-themed minigolf turning the whole thing into a proper block party—or in art-speak, a living systems sculpture—with no jewel tone or unhinged font left behind, to the top tier production design of sets, costumes, lighting effects, and projection mapping, Halsey gave us the kind of unforgettable and truly immersive shared experience that imprints on the sensory memory of everyone who was part of it.
Starting with the cerebral, genre-defying polyphonic stream of music consciousness by the Charles Gaines Collective, led by an eminence gris of a drummer who is also a canonical conceptual artist himself; to subsequent dynamic turns by DJ Pee.Wee (the slightly manic, not entirely unlike Kat Williams alter ago of Anderson Paak); and a solo trumpet, loop-machine, bass, ecstatic free-for-all by Flea as no one has ever seen him before—the night built inexorably toward the apparition of Erykah Badu. With her effortless command of neo-soul’s cosmological vagaries, ebbs, flows, crescendos, and conversations moving alongside the hypnotic, cinematic sample-craft of producer The Alchemist, Badu inhabited the technicolor multi-level set like the queen of Wonderland. Now, about that Olympics thing...
