Chase Hall’s (b. 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota) paintings and sculptures respond to generational celebrations and traumas encoded throughout American history. Responding to a variety of social and visual systems, each of which intersects with complex trajectories of race, hybridity, economics, and personal agency, Hall generates images whose materiality is as crucial to their compositional makeup as their indelible approach to representation. A central body of paintings, made with drip-brew techniques derived from coffee beans and acrylic pigments on cotton supports, is notable for both its conceptual scope and its intimacy. The use of brewed coffee carries powerful symbolic weight since it evokes centuries-old geopolitical systems associated with the commodification of a plant native to Africa, but in Hall’s hands, it also becomes a means of achieving subtle visual textures, a range of brown skin tones, and a mark-making vocabulary precipitated on the closeness of touch. Above all, however, it is his improvisational willingness to immerse himself in the indefinable personal hieroglyphics of each picture that gives his work its resonance and impact.

Chase Hall is the subject of a solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia from February 28 through August 21, 2023. In 2022, Hall was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to produce a large-scale artwork, the monumental diptych Medea Act I & II, for its opera house in New York, on view through June 2023. Hall has been included in group exhibitions including Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum (2023), Los Angeles; Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021); Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, University of Illinois Chicago (2021); and This Is America | Art USA Today, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Hall has been an artist-in-residence at The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, Massachusetts; and Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Hall’s work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hall lives and works in New York.