The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the commission of artist Lauren Halsey for the tenth edition of its popular annual Roof Garden Commission series with a new work titled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I).

The 34-year-old artist’s temporary installation will feature an inhabitable structure that at once weaves the museum’s ample holdings of Egyptian art with elements of her own personal history and visual inventory in order to create a “monument to living architecture” overlooking Central Park and Fifth Avenue.

Halsey is known for inspiring work that examines the shifting dynamic between architecture and community-building as influenced by her upbringing in and around South Central Los Angeles. Her installation is thus taken from the desire to produce, as Met director Max Hollein put it, “a powerful form of documentation” that engages with the history, iconography, and local material culture of the neighborhood remixed with elements that she says are sampled from “Pharaonic architectural symbols.” 

According to the artist, the installation “reflects my interest in conflating narratives from contemporary South Central Los Angeles with those evoked in ancient architecture. My hope is that viewers in New York feel the connections intuitively.”

Halsey is the creator of Summaeverythang, an artist-run community center that has made strides within the rapidly-changing area with a series of food programs and other initiatives aimed at enhancing the lives of Black and brown residents through a transcendent “constant infrastructure” of academic and social programs. Concepts for the initiative were developed along with Halsey's girlfriend and cousins in a series of impromptu sessions around her grandmother’s dining room table in the years following the completion of her studies at Yale’s MFA program.

“When I went to community college, I started engaging with architecture and liking it. I loved this idea of remixing my neighborhood via blueprints and space making with CAD and other rendering programs but also by hand, with my mark. It felt mythic and powerful,” she told Artforum of her background in an interview last year. “As I was making things I was realizing that I was gearing more towards a sculptural practice. I had an architectural spirit, but [it was] becoming less and less what we were learning formally in architecture classes, breaking away from [those] skills.” 

The installation opens to the public on May 17th and will remain on view on the Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden until October 23rd, when it will be disassembled and reinstalled back into the fabric of the local South Central LA community.