Chase Hall

Born 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota 

Chase Hall lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. A self-trained artist, his work has been widely exhibited at museums nationally and abroad. He has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MASS MoCA, and a number of other programs. His work is included in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, the ICA Miami, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

As exemplified in Portrait of the City, Hall’s striking compositions of browns and whites frequently use materials derived from coffee beans and brewed coffee. This inventive use of coffee as a medium for art-making is loaded with multiple references and associations. As a plant native to Africa, Hall is conjuring the histories of agriculture and labor associated with coffee’s cultivation and global reach. As a means of portraying a range of flesh tones, Hall uses coffee to question what it means to be somewhere in between whiteness and brownness, reflecting on his own identity as a biracial man in America.

Portrait of the City, an encounter with a self-identified New Yorker holding a camera, might also be considered a self-portrait -- capturing the artist as observer and witness.