Most artists who get a stage at the Hollywood Bowl are musicians. On Tuesday, Sept. 29, the whole place belonged to a sculptor. Lauren Halsey, the Los Angeles artist whose maximalist work has filled the Met’s rooftop and the Venice Biennale, took over the Bowl for emajendat, a one-night “funk opera” with Erykah Badu and The Alchemist as the headliners.
Halsey designed the technicolor stage, built for the Bowl alone, and spread her work across the grounds. The bill around Badu was stacked: Anderson .Paak spinning as DJ Pee .Wee, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the artist and composer Charles Gaines with his Collective, the L.A. jazz duo Black Nile and saxophonist Devin Daniels. The actor Yvonne Orji hosted.
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“It’s always been a goal of mine to contextualize objects around musicians in a live setting,” Halsey told ARTnews on the day of the show.
How a Sculptor Got the Bowl
She pitched it herself. After meeting Johanna Rees, the Bowl’s vice president for programming and creative partnerships, Halsey proposed what she called a campus takeover by a visual artist, “very maximalist esthetic, all anchored by a stage or a headliner.” “I knew that I just had to jump in, and the opportunity wasn’t going to come to me,” she said.
Badu was in her head from the start. Halsey had asked the singer to DJ the Hammer Museum’s 2025 gala, where Halsey was honored alongside Jane Fonda, and the Bowl show grew out of that first collaboration. “I built a sort of world around her, and I’m excited to present it,” Halsey said before the doors opened.
Parliament-Funkadelic Was the Blueprint
The model was P-Funk. The elaborate sets of Parliament-Funkadelic were a key inspiration for Halsey, who was building sets for performances at her church even before she earned her BFA at CalArts in 2012, ARTnews reports. “Literally any and everything is an ode to just what that band has done for me,” she told LAist. Every ticket holder was promised a program laying out the run of show and her “Funkafesto.”
The look came from her own collages, which she described to ARTnews as “super saturated, super dense,” and from the “funk mounds” she has been building for years, little vignettes she isolated and blew up to stage scale. Her stage rendering stacks a gold pyramid, a glassy Egyptian-style bust and airbrushed rainbow steps painted with “Dis n Dat” and “MyHood.” The title comes from her 2024 show at the Serpentine Galleries in London. “That whole show was me chasing my funk and having fun,” she said.
Before the music, the Bowl played like a boardwalk. Halsey borrowed from the Santa Monica Pier for her own arcade, with ping-pong, mini golf and basketball games, and the Bowl’s listing added double Dutch, face painting, airbrushing and sculptures to pose with.
The Night
It worked. According to a recap from CalArts, Halsey’s alma mater, tens of thousands of people packed Highland Avenue and the Bowl on a Tuesday night. Gaines, Halsey’s old teacher, played drums with his Collective to open. Flea followed with a solo set on bass, trumpet, electronics and vocals, and .Paak got the crowd dancing with records from the ’70s to now, grabbing the mic for a singalong of Silk Sonic’s “Leave the Door Open.”
Badu and The Alchemist headlined in the middle of their tour for Before the World Blows, the joint album that came out Aug. 28 and is Badu’s first in 16 years, per Stereogum. After their set, the night ended with fireworks. Watch the video for their single “Witch Doctor,” which Badu directed, below.
What’s Next
Halsey has a habit of booking musicians for her own celebrations. Ms. Lauryn Hill played the after-party when her dealer, David Kordansky, opened his New York space with her solo show, and she has also hired Doechii, Badu and Parliament-Funkadelic. Now she is calling emajendat a test run: “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 told ARTnews. Her other big L.A. project, sister dreamer, is the sculpture park she completed this year in South Central, the neighborhood where her family has lived for generations.
For one night, at least, the Bowl was hers. “It’s always been on my list, and it’ll always be on my list,” she told LAist. “It’s just, like, it’s the Bowl.”
- When
- Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026
- Where
- Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles
- Headliners
- Erykah Badu and The Alchemist
- Also on the bill
- DJ Pee .Wee (Anderson .Paak), Flea, Charles Gaines Collective with Black Nile and Devin Daniels; host Yvonne Orji
Sources
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.
