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Like a lot of broke, young, new New Yorkers, Chase Hall spent his early days in the city, in the mid-2010s, taking long walks. Hall’s walks were epic. He’d walk the edges of Manhattan, down thoroughfares, across parks and bridges, through bustling tourist traps and empty lots—often, by his estimate, walking more than 15 miles a day. (For all you pedometer-app enthusiasts, that’s roughly 30,000 steps.) In summer, he’d brave the suffocating heat; in winter, the bracing cold. He’d walk on good days and bad ones, when he had places to go and when he had nowhere to be. Hall had designs on becoming a photojournalist, so he always had a camera with him. His eyes were constantly scanning, searching for images to make, for stories to tell.
Sometimes, Hall would stop at museums and galleries, which is how his focus began to shift to painting. That’s where he saw Henry Taylor. Jackson Pollock. Charles White. Alma Thomas. Lee Krasner. Kerry James Marshall. Clyfford Still. Once he started painting himself, those walks began leading him to an area in Greenwich Village that was up the street from the restaurant where he worked, behind New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he’d scavenge for discarded canvas stretchers and other art supplies he couldn’t afford. He’d look up the syllabi for some of the art history and theory classes that were taught there and track down the books and read them on his own.
“I just remember just walking endless miles with my camera in the city and just seeing life happen in this culmination of so many different places I’d lived, almost all existing in one space,” Hall, dressed in a crisp white button-down, tells me in his studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. “Just the smells, the people, the monuments, the history, the architecture–just being in New York was like, ‘It’s all happening right here.’”
Chase Hall, The Talented Tenth (Mixed Doubles), 2025
A lot has changed since then. Hall, now 31, has had his art exhibited around the world. He’s married; his wife, Lauren Rodriguez Hall, is a designer and art director. Last year, they welcomed their first child, a daughter named Henrietta. He now teaches at NYU. But his work remains grounded in a kind of contemplative forward motion, in the slow gathering of memories, legacies, and experiences that become embedded in every piece.
“I think about Anthony Bourdain talking about how the best way to see the world is on foot; you almost hit this flow state,” Hall says. “It’s almost like a tea kettle boiling. I walk and the burner is on, and it just gets to a point where it starts hissing, and that’s where the expression comes.”
Though Hall is often referred to as a painter, his work is much more conceptual. His portraits, often of fictionalized subjects gazing directly at the viewer, combine aspects of figuration and abstraction. But the materials he uses are freighted with history. Hall, who is of mixed race, paints with a specific kind of coffee brewed from beans of African origin, which he also drinks. By his count, he’s been able to create more than 20 different tones from a single bean. His canvases are made of raw cotton; the white parts of his pieces are sections he leaves exposed, which often provide the contours and definition for his figures.
Chase Hall, Malibu, 2024
To create his works, Hall applies the coffee to the canvas while it’s still hot, which requires him to work quickly, sometimes on his hands and his knees, as it runs, bleeds, and stains the cotton. Acrylic accents are added, along with a wide variety of hidden letters, numbers, and symbols. There is a clear connection in this practice to photography. The paintings contain images that he creates but also exist as a record of sorts—of how the beans were grown and harvested; of how the cotton was picked and treated; of Hall’s own physical effort and the conditions in his studio; of the historical weight each element carries—which is not unlike the way the emulsion on film captures a moment as light filtered through a camera lens.
It’s a labor-intensive process—part art, part alchemy—and that’s the point. Coffee is a widely traded commodity with historical ties to colonialism and exploitation, particularly in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. In the U.S., cotton was a crop that once helped fuel the southern economy, relying heavily on enslaved labor. For Hall, the interplay between these materials creates a space for him to explore his own questions about subjects like masculinity, race, class, culture, and identity.
Chase Hall, Half Siblings, 2025
Chase Hall, Mama Tried, 2025
Hall’s most recent show, which opened in May at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Vienna, tackled many of those themes. It included portraits of Black men dressed in leisure attire, surrounded by sporting equipment, and others featured musical instruments—all tools of social mobility. Then there was the title: “Momma’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe.” “It was something that my father said when I was younger,” Hall recalls. “I grew up with a single mom, so hearing it when I was young complicated my own relationship to single motherhood and my pops being in and out of my life.”
Hall’s own origin story has also become part of the discourse that surrounds his work. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. His mother is white. His father is Black. He was raised primarily with his mother and had mostly intermittent contact with his father. Without getting into specifics, Hall says that both his parents were in and out of trouble and experienced periods of incarceration at points throughout his childhood. He and his mom were also constantly on the move, spending time in L.A., Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, and even Dubai, living in more working-class neighborhoods at some stops and more affluent ones at others. The one constant was that he was always the new kid. The experience provided him with an early awareness of how other people saw him—and the way that changed depending on the context. “I was one of the few Black kids in my school in Santa Monica and Malibu,” Hall says, “and then I was [viewed as] the whitewashed kid in North Omaha and on the South Side of Chicago.”
Sports like surfing, skating, and snowboarding provided outlets, but they also offered the kinds of communities that Hall felt he could join, where the punk-rock nature of them served as a kind of equalizer. “Subculture has always been a space where you’re going against the status quo, where you’re pushing for something,” he says. “If I’m going to go scratch up some marble or go to the beach and surf waves sent from thousands of miles away, there’s just this audacity that I think is directly in line with painting.”
Hall arrived in New York in 2013 and got a job as a line cook to support himself while he took pictures and built his portfolio. It was while working at a café that he started experimenting with used coffee grounds as an art-making material. But he says the idea runs back even further. He recalls staring at a scoop of vanilla-bean ice cream as a kid and noticing how the dark flecks floated in all the whiteness. In high school, he was a barista at Starbucks, where he would sketch on pieces of paper splattered and smeared with coffee.
Chase Hall, Mother and Child (Lauren and Henrietta), 2024
Hall’s early works were based in photography, but he soon began to create charcoal drawings, which he augmented with leftover coffee from work or his walks. Experimenting with it as a medium provided an impetus for him to develop a language of his own—around painting, around portraiture, around art, around what it means to exist in and engage with the world. He did a series of fellowships–at the Skohegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he studied under Sondra Perry, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, where he was mentored by Catherine Opie, among them–and had his first shows focused on this new body of work in 2020 and 2021.
Over the years, the scale of Hall’s work has grown in size and ambition. For “Halfrican,” an exhibition last year at David Kordansky Gallery in L.A., he created a 24-foot panoramic painting titled The Future and the Past (God Is Us) (2024), which depicts a large, diverse group of people of varying skin tones positioned in front of a school like they’re posing for a class photo, each of them intricately detailed with expressive marks.
Chase Hall, The Future and The Past (God is Us), 2024
“Just even that as a task—it’s like making a giant history painting,” says Michael Govan, the CEO and director of LACMA, which now has The Future and the Past (God Is Us) in its permanent collection. “It involves a lot of back pain—literally—and tremendous labor and thinking. And also the medium of coffee itself, which has the quality of a watercolor wash, where you have to control it in real time, so it’s unforgiving in a way—the intensity of that comes through.”
“I think he’s a generous person,” Govan adds, “and you see that in the work.”
For Hall, it’s less a reflection than a vision drawn from his own varied, plural, cross-cultural background and experience. “That melting-pot idea or the proof of concept of the American experiment–I feel like that has been this ongoing part of my life,” he says. “I’ve been forced to reckon with what that looked like at a younger age than a lot of other people. I think instead of that defining me or paralyzing me, I’ve been trying to think of it as galvanizing.”
Right now, Hall is very much in “experimental sandbox” mode, exploring different ways of using coffee—in sculpture, with bronzes, mixing it with inks and industrial materials. He has also been writing and working more in photography.
The birth of his daughter prompted a shift in his mindset. “I feel like having a kid has really been this catalytic moment,” he says. “Everything has been about 25x–the emotion and the courage and the fear and the worry and the love.… Everything in life has just become a lot more expansive.… Just looking into the future and what it means to become a father and what it means to see my wife become a mom—and just also recognizing how I’m looking at parenthood now so differently.”
When I spoke with the artist Rashid Johnson earlier this year, he described the period in life when you’re a child of a parent and a parent to a child as a kind of “liminal space”—something transitory, but formative, if you’re lucky enough to experience it.
Chase Hall, Matinee, 2024
For Hall, it’s been an opportunity to not only think about who he wants to be as a parent and a partner but also reckon with his own upbringing. He has even begun to connect with his father, who painted and drew himself when he was younger, in new ways. “In the last few years, we’ve been trying to build a dialogue around ‘Okay, the things you’ve been through and what you’re dealing with—make a drawing, make a painting, write about it,’ ” Hall says. “We’ve been trying to build a relationship through creativity, which has been really powerful, really special. It’s allowed me to reconcile with the realities of just how hard this all is,” he offers. “But both my parents are incredibly hilarious. Their senses of humor, their creativity, the way my mom thinks about space or the way my dad uses language to hyperbolize critical moments—these are all artistic expressions. Neither of them are artists, quote unquote, but they’re very artistically minded through the ways that they’ve had to navigate the world and operate, trying to figure it all out.”
Hall has also continued to walk, camera in hand, even after the terrain and people and places have become more familiar and sometimes easier to look past than see, convinced that with every stride he is getting closer to something. “We’re all just trying to get by—to be safe, eat food, drink water, love, be heard, laugh,” he says. “I’m really interested in how, in my work, I can create space for people to find the beauty in that existence, to find beauty in one another.”
Hair: Edward Lampley for Bumble and Bumble; makeup: Kennedy for Dior Beauty; manicures: Mayumi Abuku for Chanel; casting: Anita Bitton at the Establishment; production: Day Int.; set design: Bette Adams
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