the eastside of south central las angeles TheMET(6s)
Week 5 Chasing Beauty The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner (Natalie Dykstra) (2) (1471 – 1475) 2/22 – 2/27/2026
ID 1471
Lauren Halsey American 1987 -
the eastside of south central las angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture , 2022
Glass fiber reinforced concrete and mixed media
American artist Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles) has been commissioned to create a site-specific installation for The Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Halsey will create a full-scale architectural structure imbued with the collective energy and imagination of the South Central Los Angeles Community where she was born and continues to work. Titled the the eastside of south central las angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I). the installation is designed to be inhabited by The Met’s visitors, who will be able to explore its connections to sources as varied as ancient Egyptian symbolism, 1960s utopian architecture, and contemporary visual expressions like tagging that reflect the ways in which people aspire to make public places their own.
From the Web Site: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Halsey
www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/the-roof-garden-commis...
Lauren Halsey: emajendat | Serpentine
www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8QSJlU8CZg
Around The World
I have never had such an experience, and I felt as if I never wanted to see anything again in this world; that I might shut my eyes to keep that vision clear…I felt it, even more than I saw it. It was a terrible that fascinated.
--Isabella Stewart Gardner at KARNAK, EGYPT, 1875
(Chasing Beauty The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Natalie Dystra Mariner Books, 2024, pp 57)
Jack and Bella departed Boston on November 7, 1874…
Their destination as Egypt and a fifteen-week boat trip on the Nile. Belle began the first entry of her travel diary while still on board the Hydaspes, the steamship they took from Brandisi, an ancient port city on the eastern side of Italy’s heel across the Mediterranean to Alexandria. She mused: “When I went on deck on the morning of Decb.10, I knew that it was a dream, for never had I seen such a colour as was the sea. There is no word for it—and on the horizon was a low stretch of sand and waving Palms. I felt it was Africa and from that moment everything was interest and excitement.”…
From Alexandria, the Gardners went immediately to Cairo, where they spent another week getting their boat, a dahbiyya, (Ibis) and its provisions ready…
As Belle would observe later, “The harvest scenes are full of incident. There is so much life: people, camels, donkeys, goats, sheep, dogs, cows, and buffaloes, and all such Bible pictures.” Egypt had long stirred the popular imagination in the West, but in the decades after Napoleon’s expedition at the end of the eighteenth century and the deciphering of hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, the ancient land and its river had become de rigueur on the grand tour. By 1872, when the squeaky-voiced teenager Teddy Roosevelt and his family traveled on the Nile, the river was crowded with seasonal tourists. That same year Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose memory was badly fraying, visited the sights with his daughter Ellen. He most wanted to see the tomb of Osiris on the island of Philae, the so-called jewel of the Nile.
The Gardners encountered tourists from England, Germany, France, and Brazil, but they also met familiar faces. When they came across the boat of fellow Bostonian Thomas Gold Appleton, all they could do was wave like mad and shout across the water. They dined with General George B. McClellan and his wife, Ellen, on each other’s boats…
She drank up the sights and sounds. At the Pyramids near Cairo, which they’d visited first, before boarding the Ibis, Belle exclaimed:”…when I got away from the carriages and many of the people and could lie on the sand near the Sphinx, with the silent desert beyond and on every side and the Pyramids a little away from me—then solemnity and mystery took possession and my heart went out to the Sphinx.” Her experiences engaged all her senses.
(Chasing Beauty The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Natalie Dystra Mariner Books, 2024, pp 75-79)
the eastside of south central las angeles TheMET(6s)
Week 5 Chasing Beauty The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner (Natalie Dykstra) (2) (1471 – 1475) 2/22 – 2/27/2026
ID 1471
Lauren Halsey American 1987 -
the eastside of south central las angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture , 2022
Glass fiber reinforced concrete and mixed media
American artist Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles) has been commissioned to create a site-specific installation for The Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Halsey will create a full-scale architectural structure imbued with the collective energy and imagination of the South Central Los Angeles Community where she was born and continues to work. Titled the the eastside of south central las angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I). the installation is designed to be inhabited by The Met’s visitors, who will be able to explore its connections to sources as varied as ancient Egyptian symbolism, 1960s utopian architecture, and contemporary visual expressions like tagging that reflect the ways in which people aspire to make public places their own.
From the Web Site: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Halsey
www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/the-roof-garden-commis...
Lauren Halsey: emajendat | Serpentine
www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8QSJlU8CZg
Around The World
I have never had such an experience, and I felt as if I never wanted to see anything again in this world; that I might shut my eyes to keep that vision clear…I felt it, even more than I saw it. It was a terrible that fascinated.
--Isabella Stewart Gardner at KARNAK, EGYPT, 1875
(Chasing Beauty The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Natalie Dystra Mariner Books, 2024, pp 57)
Jack and Bella departed Boston on November 7, 1874…
Their destination as Egypt and a fifteen-week boat trip on the Nile. Belle began the first entry of her travel diary while still on board the Hydaspes, the steamship they took from Brandisi, an ancient port city on the eastern side of Italy’s heel across the Mediterranean to Alexandria. She mused: “When I went on deck on the morning of Decb.10, I knew that it was a dream, for never had I seen such a colour as was the sea. There is no word for it—and on the horizon was a low stretch of sand and waving Palms. I felt it was Africa and from that moment everything was interest and excitement.”…
From Alexandria, the Gardners went immediately to Cairo, where they spent another week getting their boat, a dahbiyya, (Ibis) and its provisions ready…
As Belle would observe later, “The harvest scenes are full of incident. There is so much life: people, camels, donkeys, goats, sheep, dogs, cows, and buffaloes, and all such Bible pictures.” Egypt had long stirred the popular imagination in the West, but in the decades after Napoleon’s expedition at the end of the eighteenth century and the deciphering of hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, the ancient land and its river had become de rigueur on the grand tour. By 1872, when the squeaky-voiced teenager Teddy Roosevelt and his family traveled on the Nile, the river was crowded with seasonal tourists. That same year Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose memory was badly fraying, visited the sights with his daughter Ellen. He most wanted to see the tomb of Osiris on the island of Philae, the so-called jewel of the Nile.
The Gardners encountered tourists from England, Germany, France, and Brazil, but they also met familiar faces. When they came across the boat of fellow Bostonian Thomas Gold Appleton, all they could do was wave like mad and shout across the water. They dined with General George B. McClellan and his wife, Ellen, on each other’s boats…
She drank up the sights and sounds. At the Pyramids near Cairo, which they’d visited first, before boarding the Ibis, Belle exclaimed:”…when I got away from the carriages and many of the people and could lie on the sand near the Sphinx, with the silent desert beyond and on every side and the Pyramids a little away from me—then solemnity and mystery took possession and my heart went out to the Sphinx.” Her experiences engaged all her senses.
(Chasing Beauty The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Natalie Dystra Mariner Books, 2024, pp 75-79)