The Monument and Its People
The history of monumental public art is a history of power — of who gets to be commemorated, whose vision of civic life gets to occupy public space at scale. The pyramid is perhaps the most loaded shape in that history: ancient, imperial, encoded with meanings that span continents and millennia. When Lauren Halsey installed a pyramid at the Arsenale in Venice in 2023, she was doing something with all of that accumulated meaning, using the most monumental of forms to carry the most particular of contents.
Halsey's pyramid was covered in hieroglyphic imagery drawn from South Central Los Angeles — from the neighbourhood she's from, from its murals and its community centres and its everyday visual culture. The figures carved into the marble and concrete weren't pharaohs or abstractions; they were the people of her community, rendered in a formal language associated with permanence and power, insisted upon as worthy of monument.
That insistence is the political and aesthetic core of her work. She has been working in South Central for years, running a community distribution centre from a former bodega, growing food in urban gardens, documenting the visual culture of a neighbourhood that is often described in terms of what it lacks rather than what it has. The pyramid was a statement at a different scale but continuous with all of that work.
Scale as Argument
When something is big enough, when it occupies space forcefully enough, it makes claims that smaller things can't make. The history of public sculpture and civic architecture is the history of this principle being applied by those with power — the building of monuments to empire, to victory, to the figures that power wished to commemorate.
Halsey deploys scale on behalf of a different community and in service of a different argument. The scale of the pyramid at Venice — which was not a modest gesture, not a small intervention, but a fully committed monumental project — insisted that the subject matter was monumental. That the lives and visual culture of South Central Los Angeles deserved this treatment. That monuments need not be for kings.
This seems obvious stated plainly. It is not obvious in practice. The art world has particular ideas about what constitutes significant subject matter, and those ideas are encoded in which artists receive the resources needed for monumental work. Halsey having those resources, Halsey receiving the invitation, Halsey using both to do exactly this — all of it was significant.
The Hieroglyph and the Contemporary
There's a formal precision in Halsey's use of the hieroglyphic register that I find genuinely interesting. Hieroglyphs are a writing system — a language — and using them for contemporary imagery creates a kind of temporal folding, places the present in conversation with a deep history in ways that neither romanticize the past nor dismiss the present.
The figures on her pyramid were not naively inserted into an ancient form. They transformed the form. The pyramid with these images is a different object than a pyramid with different images — it has different meaning, different affect, a different relationship to the viewer standing in front of it.
In Venice, surrounded by the other art world monuments, the pyramid did something that the best site-specific work does: it commented on its context by being incompatible with it. By being something the context didn't expect and couldn't fully contain.
That incompatibility was its argument. It made complete sense.
The work she's doing in South Central continues — the distribution centre, the community garden, the documentation of the neighbourhood's visual culture — and the pyramid at Venice was one highly visible node in that ongoing project rather than a separate statement. Understanding it as continuous with the community work changes what the scale means: the monumentality is not about the artist. It's about the community. That reframing is the whole argument.
I keep thinking about what it would look like for more public monuments to be organized around this logic — not the commemoration of power but the insistence on the value of specific communities, specific lives, specific visual traditions. The pyramid showed what that could look like. It looked like exactly this.
