Lauren Halsey Transforms the Hollywood Bowl for Erykah Badu Concert

Tonight, Lauren Halsey transforms the Hollywood Bowl into a large-scale installation-cum-environment for a one-night-only concert headlined by Erykah Badu. Doors open at 6 p.m., and some tickets remain available.

Halsey, the Los Angeles–based artist, has created the environment and the stage design for the event, titled after her 2024 Serpentine Galleries show "emajendat." The lineup also includes The Alchemist, DJ Pee .Wee (Anderson .Paak), Flea, and artist Charles Gaines collaborating with Black Nile and Devin Daniels. Actor Yvonne Orji hosts.

The project began with a pitch. After meeting Johanna Rees, vice president for programming and creative partnerships at the Hollywood Bowl, Halsey proposed an idea she had long been considering. "I knew that I just had to jump in, and the opportunity wasn't going to come to me," she told ARTnews. "I said to her, 'What would you think about a visual artist doing a campus takeover—very maximalist esthetic, all anchored by a stage or a headliner.' … I thought how cool it could be to just remix it and turn it on its head."

Rees agreed, and they invited Badu—whom Halsey had in mind from the start, having recently asked the singer to DJ the Hammer Museum's 2025 gala, which honored Halsey alongside actor and activist Jane Fonda.

The venue holds deep personal history for the artist. Halsey remembers visiting the Bowl on childhood field trips and summer camps. "The spaciousness, how beautiful it is—I always knew I wanted to do something there," she said.

The discipline-crossing impulse goes back further still. Before earning her BFA at California Institute of the Arts in 2012, Halsey made sets for performances at the church she attended; the elaborate stage productions of Parliament-Funkadelic were a key inspiration. "It's always been a goal of mine to contextualize objects around musicians in a live setting," she said.

As her career has ascended, Halsey has repeatedly brought musicians into her orbit. When her dealer, David Kordansky Gallery, opened its New York space with a Halsey solo show, she asked Ms. Lauryn Hill to perform at the after party in the Boom Boom Room. Her hires have also included Badu, Doechii, and Parliament-Funkadelic.

The Bowl event builds directly on the Badu collaboration. "I built a sort of world around her, and I'm excited to present it," Halsey said. That world draws on her collage works, which she described as "super saturated, super dense."

She also scaled up motifs from her own vocabulary. "I started going back to this typology I call my 'funk mounds' that have these little vignettes inside of them, and isolating moments that I wanted to scale in a very experimental way," she said. "I don't want to give it away, but I've done that basically."

The campus takeover references another iconic Los Angeles site: the Santa Monica Pier. Halsey has re-created the boardwalk's arcade and carnival attractions—ping pong tables, mini golf, and basketball games, the last a favorite of hers—in her own idiom. "I'm doing my own version of that, in my language," she said.

The Serpentine show supplies both the title and the spirit of the evening. "That whole show was me chasing my funk and having fun," Halsey said. "I've tried to bring that energy and that looseness, and that sort of free-spirited way of making to this—and it's been liberating."

The work has been substantial, but Halsey considers it worthwhile. She expects the evening to draw "a multitude of demographics and ages," including audiences who might not typically visit museums and galleries.

She also sees the takeover as a beginning rather than a one-off: "a proof of concept for this festival and concert I hope to have every year in Los Angeles, where perhaps I build an aesthetic universe around musicians," she said—a vision she connects to Sister Dreamer Park in South Los Angeles, a project she has "workshopped for almost 17 years in different institutions, museums, backyards."