Photo: Timothy Norris Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story On Monday afternoon, less than 24 hours before the debut of what was inarguably Lauren Halsey’s biggest artistic presentation to date, things were a little frenzied in her South Los Angeles workshop. When she signed on for our Zoom interview, members of her team could be seen weaving in and out of the frame behind her, carrying everything from a neon-painted pharaoh to a plastic light-up palm tree.
Halsey was overwhelmed, underwater—but she was also “floating.”
“There’s this level in funk where you’re ‘on the one,’” said the lifelong funkateer, a devotee of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic and its psychedelic, Afrofuturist universe. “You’ve reached your highest level of your interplanetary function, and that means everything is in the perfect flow. I feel like that even though I’m so stressed.”
The following evening, the artist, known for building maximalist architectural environments that sample and remix the signs, storefronts, symbols, people, and visual language of South Central LA, would attempt something the Hollywood Bowl had never seen before: a fine artist transforming the storied amphitheater and its grounds and staff uniforms into a world of her own making.
“Usually, the cadence for an art project is you get the work, you complete the work, you get the work to the gallery, and that’s the work,” Halsey said. This, however, was “a whole ecosystem.”
At the center of that world was Erykah Badu, who would be performing inside a sprawling modular set built from hundreds of objects Halsey and her team spent months making by hand, including a three-dimensional collage of technicolor palms, Egyptian forms, hand-painted signage, and monumental sculptures. “Things have become so digital,” said Halsey. “Things have become so flat that, like, I miss the handmade.”
Photo: Timothy Norris The bill also included Anderson .Paak as DJ Pee .Wee, Flea, Halsey’s longtime friend and artistic hero Charles Gaines, and dancers from Debbie Allen Dance Academy. But the show was only part of it: Halsey’s takeover began before anyone took the stage, with the Bowl grounds transformed through sculpture, roller skating, miniature golf, basketball, airbrushing, and ping-pong. Meanwhile, custom, hand-dyed Agolde tablecloths covered the venue’s roughly 680 boxes, some 470 Bowl workers got Halsey-designed Agolde shirts, and stagehands traded their usual black for “really wild foil jumpsuits” and sculptural wigs. And then there were the “fireworks and lasers and all sorts of surprises.”
“Lauren is building this beautiful three-dimensional modular set, and I’m honored that she asked me to be the music inside of it,” Badu told Vogue ahead of the event. “I’ve performed at the Hollywood Bowl many times. But this time, I won’t be stepping into the Hollywood Bowl. I’ll be stepping into Lauren’s world.”
Halsey calls that world emajendat , a concept she first realized on a large scale at London’s Serpentine South Gallery in 2024, where she turned the space into a technicolor “funk garden” that transported the visual language of South Central some 5,000 miles away. At the Serpentine, her usual motifs collided with prismatic floors and walls made from CDs, sand dunes, and fantastical sculptures, and even then she described emajendat as a project she planned to “continue to prototype and one day present at home, in Los Angeles.” Two years later, the Hollywood Bowl project represents th…