On March 14, multidisciplinary artist Lauren Halsey announced the Spring 2026 opening of her sculpture park and garden. The park is located on the corner of Western Avenue and 76th Street in South Los Angeles. Named Sister Dreamer, the space will serve as a living shrine and tribute to the neighborhood that Halsey and her family have called home for several generations.
“I grew up on Western Avenue, in the area surrounding my sister’s dream. It was and still is a beautiful environment, a place and time of joy, genius, and freedom,” Halsey asserts. “Throughout my life, many buildings were burned down, abandoned, and left empty. Yet what always stood out to me were the people who informally activated these open spaces: selling Christmas trees, running ad-hoc barbecue pop-ups, holding church services, or using them as an ephemeral space to sell hundreds of mix CDs. The community understood that these empty lots could be used for different functions and needs. And it is this same ingenuity, imaginative capacity, and everyday brilliance that Sister Dreamer celebrates and is focused on activating for others in my community.”
Born and based in South L.A., Halsey is known for creating vibrant, large-scale works and immersive installations, as well as mixed-media assemblages and hand-carved works that bridge sculpture and architecture and that draw on the histories, social contexts, and vernacular poetics of South Central.
Lauren Halsey’s practice places her community’s expressive cultures into a dynamic exchange with Afro-diasporic mythologies, funk music and aesthetics, personal memory, and collective history. Her artworks and architectural projects have gained international attention and acclaim. For over fifteen years, Halsey has developed and built upon concepts offering viewers new ways of imagining and experiencing the plenitude and vibrancy of Black expressive life. These works capture Black life in its most elaborate or mundane arrangements and forms.
“Lauren Halsey’s, Sister Dreamer is a monumentally important artwork and more,” said Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of LACMA. “It inscribes local iconography into a timeless narrative. Lauren’s architectonic-scale sculpture, transformed into a public park, invites reflection, creates well-being, and lifts lives and life stories. There’s nothing quite like it in LA, or anywhere.”
Sister Dreamer is Halsey’s latest and largest project of world-building and fantastical flight. Located on a street where Halsey rode her bike as a child and constructed in a vacant lot that once was home to a community-beloved ice cream business, Halsey’s site-specific sculpture park is composed of the following:
• A courtyard with six water features, fruit trees, vegetables, and plants that are native to the project site and the surrounding neighborhood
• Architecture clad with concrete panels
• Eight Sphinxes and eight Hathoric columns at two entrances featuring the artist’s personal heroes, family friends, community activists, and organizers
• A dedicated programming space for on-site film screenings, health and wellness events, community-centric celebrations, jazz nights, sport activations, lecture series, tutoring, and youth-engaged programs