Chase Hall Complicates Representations of Blackness in His Debut Museum Show

When artist Chase Hall was starting out, two of his major influences were his father, and the late figurative painter Jacob Lawrence. Both men’s artmaking tools feature in Hall’s debut museum solo exhibition, sitting in recycled cans and jars. Encased in a small vitrine, they form Hall’s sculptural work Incarceration, Liberation, Perspiration (2023), on view in “The Close of Day” at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art through August 21st.

Hanging adjacent to the readymade-esque piece is Self-Portrait (2022), in which Hall appears seated in his studio, paintbrushes neatly organized behind him, as he looks out at the viewer with a soft smile. The pairing of these works not only serves as an introduction to Hall and his practice, but also situates him within an artistic lineage.

Forgoing the traditional, gatekept path into the fine art world, Hall has had a less conventional journey. Unlike his peers whose names can be found next to his on the roster of David Kordansky Gallery or Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Hall didn’t attend college and doesn’t hold a BFA or MFA in fine art. Instead, a 20-year-old Hall would sneak into his then-girlfriend, now-wife Lauren Rodriguez’s studio at the Parsons School of Design, where she was in her senior year studying painting and sculpture.

“Oftentimes, not coming from the background of the art world,” Hall said in a recent interview with Artsy, “there was always this relationship to: ‘Is it good enough? Can I perform harder than the next person?’” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hall’s feelings of self-doubt in the face of success can be discerned by viewers in the career milestone that is his museum debut. In the paintings in “The Close of Day,” Black people are depicted in moments of contentment: They gather for a team photo, display the fish they caught, and watch the sunset on the land they own. And yet, within these scenes of accomplishment, there’s an air of melancholy.

Hall’s painted vignettes often draw on themes of entertaining, and the inseparable reality that Black people must often be excellent in order to achieve a fraction of the accolades bestowed upon their white counterparts. The Family Was All Around Me (2020), for example, depicts an ominous wall of faces watching a father and his two sons play the drums together. Thelonious Number (2018–19), meanwhile, pays tribute to the famed jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and reminds the viewer of the genre’s entwinement with slavery and segregation. Paired with the expectation of exceptionalism is the belief that a Black person’s value is tied to their ability to entertain.

“There’s a sadness,” Hall remarked. “They’re heavier paintings than they are funny and light.” This ambivalence is also evident in Tuskegee Airman (2022), which portrays an unidentified Black aviator; only the artwork title suggests that he fought in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Until that point, the Black men who tried to enlist and train as U.S. military pilots were rejected. The Tuskegee Airmen were the result of decades of advocacy. Success achieved in spite of racial inequality is still bittersweet.

“What does it mean to have to grin and bear it, and at what point do you share it so you’re not living your whole life in a space of twitchy anger? And what does it mean, in relationship to my own hybridity, to show both of those ideas?” asked Hall, who was born to a Black father and white mother, and raised by the latter.

This tension is evident in the artist’s choice of materials: cotton and coffee, both commodities linked to slavery and colonialism. Just as the U.S. economy was buttressed by the cotton industry and its reliance on enslaved labor, cotton also serves as the foundation of Hall’s paintings. Areas of Hall’s surfaces are left bare and unpainted, visible like the legacy of slavery that continues to inform contemporary life. Staining his cotton canvases, coffee adds a layer of not only historical, but also personal significance to Hall’s practice. From the ages of 14 to 17, he worked at Starbucks and used coffee to draw cartoon-like doodles. What started as a practical decision based on financial limitations and his inability to afford paint became intentional sociopolitical commentary.

Objects with loaded histories also feature in his sculptures. Though he has become known for his paintings, Hall returns to this other aspect of his practice in “The Close of Day” to evoke Savannah’s history. An extra gallery space made out of bricks, constructed specifically for the exhibition, recalls Savannah Gray Bricks, which were hand-formed by enslaved Africans. Indeed, the entire museum, previously an antebellum railroad complex, was built from the salvaged brick walls originally erected through enslaved labor.

The room is something of a religious space: A Hundred Year Old Breath (1923/2023) features a self-playing Wurlitzer organ that was built on July 7, 1923, and will turn 100 this year, during the run of the exhibition. Paired with the organ are pews that were made in 1888 for a Black church in North Carolina, reminiscent of those Hall sat in as a child, uninterested in sermons and opting to play Pokémon on his Game Boy instead.

One of the six paintings lining the interior of the brick room is Our Final Plea on Ivory Keys (2020–22), which depicts two Black men around a piano. While one sits and plays, the other stands looking up, mouth open in song. Exhibited with A Hundred Year Old Breath, it evokes hymns sung during church service and, a little further back in history, the spirituals sung by enslaved Africans who found hope in the Bible. “It’s these spaces where you are supposed to attempt at being ‘free,’ but in that attempt, you’re actually bracketed in someone else’s idea of life and what that looks like,” Hall said. Christianity’s role in suppressing slave rebellions and continued connection to colonialism are difficult to ignore.

In confronting these layered themes, Hall employs a more subtle approach than in his earlier sculptures. His 2018 piece fishing with dad, for instance, features concrete-cast sculptures of a Black father and son. They sit on wooden police barricades as if perched on the edge of a pier, and each hold a cotton branch like a fishing pole, linking modern-day policing to early 18th-century slave patrols, and today’s exploitative prison labor with slavery. Meanwhile, jocko graves as myself (2018) is a sculpture of the Black 12-year-old who tended to George Washington’s horses during the American Revolutionary War and died of hypothermia. The iconography attached to Jocko Graves has since devolved into a Sambo-esque lawn jockey, but in this rendition, Graves’s face is half-painted over in white, referencing Hall’s own biracial identity.