PROJECTS

For their inaugural project, the Hästens Art Support Fund is proud to support the fabrication of Lauren Halsey’s upcoming project at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Read more here.
Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles) rethinks the possibilities for art, architecture, and community engagement. She produces both stand-alone 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 a 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.

Hästens is pleased to support “Tala Madani: Biscuits,” the first North American survey of Iranian-born artist Tala Madani presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Read more here.
Tala Madani's (b. 1981, Tehran) work brings together various modes of critique about gender, particularly masculine and feminine stereotypes, as well as questioning westernised idealistic notions of childhood, family and the art historical canon. Her work is inflected with a peevish sense of humour and brings to bear basic human feelings and emotions, such as anxiety, anger, fear, isolation, paranoia, envy and lust. Madani received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2006.

Hästens Art Support Fund is pleased to support “Henry Taylor: B Side,” a retrospective spanning thirty years of the Log Angeles artist Henry Taylor’s work in painting, sculpture, and installation. This retrospective will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in November 2022. Read more here.
Henry Taylor (b. 1958, Ventura, CA) continues to delve into and expand upon the language of portraiture and painting, while also pointing to the social and political issues affecting African Americans today. From racial inequality, homelessness, and poverty, to the importance of family and community, Taylor says, “My paintings are what I see around me…they are my landscape paintings.” His portraits reveal a fascination with the sitters, as well as with the psychological and physical implications of “space”—public vs. private, interior vs. exterior.