Artists
Erykah Badu
DJ Pee .Wee (Anderson .Paak)
Charles Gaines Collective featuring Black Nile
Lauren Halsey

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ABOUT LAUREN HALSEY
Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles) is rethinking the possibilities for art, architecture, and community engagement. She produces both standalone artworks and site-specific projects, particularly in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles where her family has lived for several generations. Combining found, fabricated, and handmade objects, Halsey’s work maintains a sense of civic urgency and free-flowing imagination, reflecting the lives of the people and places around her and addressing the crucial issues confronting people of color, queer populations, and the working class. Critiques of gentrification and disenfranchisement are accompanied by real-world proposals as well as celebration of on-the-ground aesthetics. Inspired by Afrofuturism and funk, as well as the signs and symbols that populate her local environments, Halsey creates a visionary form of culture that is at once radical and collaborative.

Halsey has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Serpentine, London, England (2024); Seattle Art Museum, WA (2022); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2018). Halsey presented monumental site-specific installations at Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024 and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden in 2023. Halsey is the 2021 recipient of the Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize and received the Mohn Award for artistic excellence at the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2018 biennial. Recent group exhibitions include Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2024–2025); Reverberations, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2024); He Said/She Said: Contemporary Women Artists Interject, Dallas Museum of Art, TX (2023); The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2023); and Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2021). Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. In 2020, Halsey founded Summaeverythang Community Center and in 2026, completed sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles, a major public sculpture park in South Central Los Angeles. Halsey lives and works in Los Angeles.

ABOUT ERYKAH BADU
Erykah Badu is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, and actress. Influenced by R&B, 1970s soul, and 1980s hip hop, Badu became associated with the neo soul subgenre in the 1990s and 2000s along with artists such as D’Angelo and Maxwell. She has been called the “Queen of Neo Soul.”

ABOUT DJ PEE .WEE (ANDERSON .PAAK)
Born Brandon Paak Anderson in Oxnard, California, as a teen he played drums in his church Band. His transformation into Anderson .Paak, with his debut album Venice and a sophomore release, 2016’s Malibu met with universal rave reviews. .Paak is now an 9x GRAMMY Award winner, producer, songwriter, artist & director. Anderson released his highly regarded 2020 single “Lockdown” on Juneteenth. Inspiration for the song came from .Paak’s participation in a Los Angeles protest against police brutality. .Paak won the GRAMMY Award for Best Melodic Rap Performance of “Lockdown” and the politically charged video directed by Dave Meyers, garnered .Paak a GRAMMY nom for Best Music Video. “Lockdown” was featured on a multitude of “Best Of” 2020 lists from NPR, The FADER, Complex and President Barack Obama’s annual “Favorite Music” list. In October 2020, .Paak was named as Vans’ first ever Global Music Ambassador. The artist has an ongoing partnership with the iconic brand that includes exclusive footwear and accessory collections inspired by .Paak’s Southern California roots. His directing credits now include the highly regarded Bonnie and Clyde-esque music video for Leon Bridges’ “Motorbike.” Most recently, .Paak has joined fellow artist Bruno Mars as one half of the R&B superduo, Silk Sonic. Their debut single “Leave The Door Open” garnered over 460 million streams and 350 million official video views. The album’s November 12, 2021 release received worldwide critical acclaim and earned the duo 4 Grammys. Anderson .Paak is a multi-hyphenate superstar who will now use his platform to propel new talent into the spotlight with the creation of his very own label APESHIT teaming with UMG.

ABOUT CHARLES GAINES
A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art and music, Charles Gaines’s body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms, often addressing issues of race in ways that transcend the limits of representation. Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and around the world, most notably a major survey at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2023), which traveled to the Phoenix Art Museum (2024); Dia Beacon, New York (2021); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014) and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015). He was included in the Whitney Biennial, New York (1975) and the Venice Biennale, Italy (2007 and 2015). Large-scale permanent public commissions include Hannan ArtPark, Cincinnati, OH (2024); Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, Montgomery, AL (2025); Intuit Dome, Inglewood, CA (forthcoming, 2026); Culver City, CA (forthcoming, 2027); and John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, NY (forthcoming, 2027). His Manifestosseries of musical compositions translate political or other important texts into music written for diverse instruments from large ensembles to solo piano. Gaines remixes conventional musical materials through his unique process which generates surprising results bringing out deeper relationships between sound, language and society. In 2019, Gaines received the 60th Edward MacDowell Medal. He was inducted into the National Academy of Design’s 2020 class of National Academicians and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2022. In 2023, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

ABOUT BLACK NILE
Brothers Aaron and Lawrence Shaw, performing as Black Nile, are redefining Los Angeles jazz. Raised in Inglewood, the GRAMMY-nominated duo views jazz as a form of rebellion and a cultural zeitgeist—one that mirrors the community-driven hustle of Nipsey Hussle and the creative defiance of Tyler, the Creator. Their latest album, Indigo Garden, blends high-concept improvisation with hip-hop production and sampling. Having collaborated with icons like Herbie Hancock, Steve Lacy, and Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Black Nile honors the lineage of Leimert Park while pushing the genre forward. For the Shaws, jazz is a living, breathing language of Black American resistance and communal celebration.