By Darlene Donloe
Contributing Writer
HOLLYWOOD — One of contemporary art’s most celebrated sculptors — South Los Angeles native Lauren Halsey — is taking over the Hollywood Bowl at 8 p.m. Sept. 29, not as a spectator. As the architect.
She’s calling it “emajendat.” The word is pure Halsey. Think technicolor maximalism, funk muralism, Black space-making, remixed and restacked for a venue that usually does tuxedos and picnics.
“I’m calling it a funk-opera,” Halsey said. “This isn’t your typical music show where the performer comes out. From 8 p.m. to when she exits the stage, there is meaning being made. There’s no dead space. All of it is super rich in every single minute. It’s like going to Broadway.”
The “she” Halsey refers to is Erykah Badu, who will perform with The Alchemist. They will perform their much-anticipated collaborative album “Before the World Blows” from start to finish at the Bowl.
Halsey’s Bowl-world doesn’t stop there. DJ Pee Wee — otherwise known as Anderson Paak — will spin a set on the turntables. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers also will get in on the action.
Visual artist Charles Gaines and his collective will join with L.A. jazz torchbearers Black Nile and saxophonist Devin Daniels. The Debbie Allen Dance Academy will be part of it, too, with each performer having their own staging.
“What’s really fun about it is each act will have its own sort of stage and aesthetic identity,” Halsey said. “No act will have the same stage. There is a turntable that turns, and then the next act comes on with their own identity.”
The main stage itself — Halsey’s riff on a stepped pyramid — is a stack of box modules with vignettes inside. Badu will move in and out of them, in and out of different environments Halsey is building just for her.
“Without giving away too much, it’s gonna be a stack of forms, and the forms have these vignettes inside of them,” Halsey said.
And before anyone plays a note, you’re already inside her installation. Halsey is remaking the entire Bowl in her sculptural language.
“There’ll be a play zone where there will be sort of a remix of basketball, Pop-a-Shot game, and my own plushies, my own prizes,” she said. “There will be sculptural ping-pong tables. I love ping pong, double dutch, airbrush face painting, a mini golf putting lounge all in my sculptural language. There will be photo booths and architectural facades.”
For Halsey, this is a homecoming. The Hollywood Bowl was a summer camp field trip as a kid. Now it’s a canvas.
“The Hollywood Bowl is an iconic venue,” she said. “It’s my favorite venue in L.A. As a kid, we took field trips there during summer camp. … It’s cool that all these years later, I get to contextualize it in my poetic way.”
How did a sculptor who just opened the “Sister Dreamer” pocket park in South Los Angeles get the Hollywood Bowl to say yes to a full art takeover?
She courted them. And she texted Erykah Badu.
“The idea started pre-Erykah,” Halsey said. “I’ve always wanted to do this because of my inspiration growing up in church, being inspired by George Clinton in Parliament-Funkadelic and the funk operas they were putting on in the late 70s. I always wanted to figure out a point in my career in which I could complete the fine art world that I’m a part of with other worlds.”
She’s hired Lauryn Hill. She’s hired P-Funk a ton of times. Doechii. Last year, after she won an artist award in New York — Badu presented it — she hired Badu to DJ the after-party for a Hammer Museum honor.
“I texted Francesco [Risso, who used to run Marni (a luxury fashion house), I said, ‘Hey, can you connect me with Erykah? I would love to hire her.’ That was me starting a relationship with her,” Halsey said.
Post “Sister Dreamer,” she felt ready to bring that same architectural ambition to a democratized context like music. She asked a friend for an introduction to bowl officials.
“I said, ‘How would you feel about a sculptor reimagining the campus, all tethered to a very ambitious Bowl stage that talent will perform on,’” Halsey said. “They said, ‘If you can get a headliner, sure.’ And so, I texted Erykah and sent her a very simple rendering, and she said, ‘Yeah.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’”
From there, the show grew.
Badu has been, Halsey said, “an incredible collaborator and she’s been so encouraging.”
And what is “emajendat?” Ask Halsey and she smiles.
“Whatever is in you to imagine,” she said. “You and 17,549 other people are walking into this venue as a participant in my imagining, and I hope that when folks leave, blue, black, yellow, white, brown, child, elderly, that whatever it is that needs to summon their imagining of something positive, that they go for that, too.”
That philosophy — she calls it funk-muralism, Black space-making — runs through everything.
Whether it’s a 2021 commission for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she remixed contemporary South Los Angeles images with ancient Egyptian and Nubian works, or her solo shows at Gagosian Paris and Serpentine London in 2024, or Summaeverythang, her community initiative.
“I work across different technologies in my practice, and I don’t bifurcate,” Halsey said. “I don’t have hierarchies. The “Sister Dreamer” Sculpture Park is as important to me as this upcoming night.”
And South Central is always the source code.
“There is no place quite like South Central,” she said. “There are several South Centrals, but there is no South Central like the one I call home. … I love the ingenuity. I love the tamale man. I love the ice cream truck. I love the stuffed animal man. I love it.”
Asked if the scale of the upcoming work scares her, she doesn’t hesitate.
“I don’t have fear in anything I do,” she said. “I deeply believe in God. I didn’t get this idea out of the blue. People get wrapped up in fear, and they just get stuck. I have never done anything like this before. But I’m really energized and excited, and I think it’s going to be wonderful.”
Is it a one-off? No. This is Year One.
“This is not a one-off,” Halsey said. “‘emajendat’ is a concept for my festival. I’m going to have a music festival that bridges together these worlds of art, community-centric activation and sport. This is year one of my music festival.”
Just like “Sister Dreamer” had a year one in 2013 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, year two at the Hammer’s Made in L.A. in 2018, year three at the Met in 2022 — then the park. Same cadence.
“I am contributing to the record in the archive of South Central Los Angeles, poetics, material cultures, our heroes, our architectures, our movements, and it’s not an anthropological study,” Halsey said. “I’m reshaping. I’m sampling, I’m remixing, and I’m presenting it in new forms, and that can be the form of a T-shirt, a stage, or music. It could be architecture. It could be a sculpture.”
On Sept. 29, it will be all of those at once.
Darlene Donloe is a freelance reporter for Wave Newspapers who covers South Los Angeles. She can be reached at ddonloe@gmail.com.
