With its autumn colours and lush dampness, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are particularly gorgeous at this time of year, but inside the Serpentine South Gallery another kind of garden has sprung up.
For Lauren Halsey’s first UK exhibition, the LA-born artist has created a different sort of public space altogether – a riotous, brightly-hued Funk Garden that pays exultant homage to her predominantly Black South Central neighbourhood.
And wow, what a place it must be. Neon striped panthers and sphinxes jumble together in her immersive, three-room installation with cloud-like rocks in psychedelic colours.
Signs for businesses like Vanessa’s Positive Energy (“Meet great people! Dance! Exercise! Have fun”), Rims ‘n’ Thangs (tires and wheels) or beauty salons advertising weaves and dreads sit next to mirrored palm trees covered in smiling Black faces. A collage wall is an extravaganza of pictures evoking Black pride and protest; on another wall a film loops of young people street dancing in a carpark.
In the third room, hundreds of objects and images – from a poster hailing a young woman of colour as her college’s 2021 valedictorian to a tiny dark-skinned ballerina figurine – are contained within the clear Perspex floor; an oversized figure of a Black female basketball player stands at the room’s entrance, while a young girl kneels in the centre, clad in a multi-coloured leopard print combo for which I know women who would kill, drawing lines of light on the floor with her pencil.
Oh and there’s a three-tiered wall fountain, made of increasingly huge hands, with the most epic nails you’ve ever seen.
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Along with artists like Theaster Gates in Chicago and Titus Kaphar in New Haven, Halsey – who is founder of an active South Central community centre, Summaeverythang – is one of a growing number of American artists of colour pushing forward a deeply committed social practice.
Embedded in her neighbourhood, she wanders its streets, picking things up and tracking the changes in its material culture through her work (the ultimate goal is to create a permanent sculpture garden there). And she’s interested in the effect of architectural materials – how the nuts and bolts (and grilles and window bars and bullet-proof Plexiglass and barbed wire) of our urban environment affects the way we see and feel about ourselves or others.
Hers, then, is an insider’s view – the everyday reality experienced by the community that actually lives there, instead of the outsider’s idea of a place that, on the evidence of its architectural trappings, might be dangerous, downtrodden, poverty-stricken – the way it's more often depicted in media and art.
Her South Central is vibrant, “energetic, inviting and beautiful”. With her Funk Garden, she makes a space that reflects the pride and power in her community and her place, magnifying them both. I’m glad to have visited.
