Lauren Halsey, 38, is known for her Afrofuturist immersive installations, sculptures and mixed-media works. They variously allude to ancient Egypt, funk music and the storefronts and signage of South Central Los Angeles, where she was born and raised and is still based. This March, she opened a public sculpture park with a garden in the neighborhood.
Decorative porcelain Black figurines, the kind that her mother and grandmother would display in their homes, are another of her touchstones. She sources them primarily around South Central, though once, she and a friend drove two hours north of the city to buy boxes of figurines from a couple who turned out to be white. (“It was quite awkward,” Halsey says. “The couple didn’t expect my friend and me [to be Black] — which is shocking — and I didn’t expect them to look like they did. We were all dumbfounded.”) Over the past 20 years, she’s accumulated around 2,000 of these mass-produced statuettes, which typically depict Black people performing everyday activities like sitting in a rocking chair. She started incorporating them into her work when taking architecture classes at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif., and again while earning an M.F.A. at the Yale School of Art’s sculpture program, though lately, she mostly reserves them for her personal collection (which also includes other types of mass-produced statuary). “They make me feel good, and they conjure, depending on the figurine, a very specific memory,” she says. “It feels like my life and so many folks’ lives, articulated in a form.”
The collection: “Most of the figurines in the collection are Black folks in church — playing the tambourine, at the piano, in a choir. But I have all sorts of them, like someone reading a book or a kid playing in a tree or a woman working out, with dramatized aerobics or calisthenics. Or they’ll depict a dice or card game, or Black women laughing in the kitchen.”
Number of pieces in the collection: More than 2,000.
First purchase: “I went to a local discount store off Crenshaw and Manchester in 2006 with my grandmother. The store’s no longer there. I don’t know where they were importing the figurines from, but I just bought them up. One was a very stylized D.J., and then there was another version of the same character skiing. He’s not wearing ski clothes; he has on this yellow-and-red letterman jacket, silver bottoms and funky glasses, and he’s staring into space.”
Latest acquisition: “A friend gave me a box of figurines in different church scenes. I have so many church scenes, I could set up a megachurch congregation.”
Most expensive: “They’re always around the same price — maybe $5 or $7. I’ve even gotten them for 99 cents. I’ve never spent more than $10 on one. They’re the most humble [objects] and are always at the discount store, or even in the corner of somebody’s liquor store.”
Has one ever broken? “Yes, a hundred have. The heads pop off, someone drops them, I drop them. It’s devastating. But I usually repurpose those in my work.”
Most precious: “There’s this iconic Annie Lee painting of an exhausted Black woman sitting on a bed. You’ve seen it: ‘Blue Monday’ (1982). I have 11 [figurines depicting that painting]. I see myself and so many women around me in that one [image]. It motivates me to get up and not sit in my weariness.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Photo assistant: Andrés Melo. Photo retouching: Elizabeth Oporto
