FRESH PAINT: Chase Hall

For the eighth iteration of the collaborative _FRESH PAINT_ exhibition series, the Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation are pleased to present work by artist Chase Hall (American, b. 1993 in St. Paul, Minnesota). For his _FRESH PAINT_ presentation, Hall will create a new painting that will be exhibited for the first time at the Parrish. For over ten years, Hall has been creating figurative paintings that explore the multifaceted nature of life, culture, and history. Though the subjects are fictional characters born from the artist's imagination, they also have roots in Hall's personal experience. "A lot of these start with archetypal representations of a self seen through different narratives, landscapes, and types of people," he explains. "Oftentimes, I'm thinking of family members or friends, brotherhood, and this idea of being and becoming." Whether presented in more traditional portraiture or engaged in scenes of athleticism, physical labor, community gathering, and even myth and fantasy, Hall's figures are typically depicted at life scale, imbuing them with a sense of humanity and creating a direct relationship to the viewer. In _The Affrilachian Mountains_, the artist responds to the period following the abolition of enslavement in the late nineteenth century, when thousands of African Americans migrated to the Appalachians in the eastern United States to find work in the region's coal fields. Depicting a scene of miners gathered together, the painting stems from Hall's longstanding interest in the human impulse to recognize collective histories, endeavors, and accomplishments through photography and group portraiture. His incorporation of found objects—antique agricultural tools and rusted food tins that once housed coffee, tobacco, and malt liquor—points to the complicated histories of labor and commodity production in the United States. Hall's compositions emerge from his improvisational approach to painting. The figures are not pre-planned but take shape as the artist works the canvas. The spontaneous nature of their creation is also dictated by the inherently unpredictable nature of the materials Hall uses: freshly brewed coffee on raw cotton. Where traditional paints like oil and acrylic "behave for the brush and the artist," Hall explains that "working with a beverage that's boiling, it wants to run off the painting immediately." The aqueous medium necessitates "a kind of corralling" and rapid decision making on Hall's part, resulting in a range of marks—from stained fields of amber and burnt umber to wiry linear brushstrokes that lend the compositions their crackling sense of movement. Hall is drawn to coffee not only for its tonal range, but also for its political associations. Taken from Africa and brought to the Americas in the eighteenth century, the coffee seed parallels the histories of Hall's own ancestors, and painting with the beverage allows him to engage with its ties to colonialism, extraction, labor, and wealth production. At the same time, Hall's use of coffee as a painting medium lifts it out of its typical context of trade and consumption, adding new layers to its history. Much of Hall's project is about giving form to duality. Born to a Black father and white mother, the artist reflects on his own biracial identity in his work, exploring the conditions of constantly navigating a hybrid state. While many of his paintings address histories of labor, Hall also represents his subjects in the midst of leisure activities: they sport tennis racquets and surfboards, race on horseback, and drift in the ocean alongside marine life. There is an undeniable sense of freedom in these scenes, which posit identity not as a servant to boundaries and classifications, but as a space of expansive possibility. _FRESH PAINT_ is a rotating series of single-artwork exhibitions at the Parrish that spotlight new or rarely exhibited works by both emerging and established artists. By circumventing traditional exhibition planning timelines—which can extend years into the future—_FRESH PAINT_ provides a platform for artists to promptly showcase freshly created artworks and ideas, allowing for a more direct response to current issues and cultural movements. This approach fosters a timelier dialogue between the Museum, visitors, and our surrounding community. Presented in the Parrish's Creativity Lounge located in the Lobby, _FRESH PAINT_ is open to the public at no charge during regular Museum hours. Each _FRESH PAINT_ installation is also accompanied by a commissioned interpretative text by an invited author, critic, poet, or scholar. This iteration of _FRESH PAINT_ features a conversation between Hall and British writer, curator, and broadcaster Ekow Eshun. Read the text [here](https://parrishart.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/FRESH-PAINT-Chase-Hall-Booklet-Web.pdf). _FRESH PAINT: Chase Hall_ is organized by Scout Hutchinson, The FLAG Art Foundation Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Parrish Art Museum, in collaboration with Jon Rider, Director; Caroline Cassidy, Deputy Director; and Madeline DeFilippis, Exhibitions and Programs Manager, at FLAG. **Exhibition Support **_FRESH PAINT: Chase Hall_ is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous support of The FLAG Art Foundation.