Chase Hall Is Just Grateful Doing the Work

Chase Hall speaks like someone who has thought about every word he utters—who has carefully examined the nuance of his identity and done a lifetime of introspection about who he is and why he is here. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a white mother and Black father, the 32-year-old artist’s practice “is an exploration of the impossible absolute of biracial identity.” In the tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness, Hall said he’s interested in illustrating what “visualizing the duality of a mixed-race experience can be in terms that are both personal and cultural.” After we struggled to coordinate an interview, Hall was refreshingly earnest when we finally met over Zoom. There is a calmness and peacefulness to his disposition that quickly tempers any anxiety I might have been feeling.

Hall’s paintings often depict familial and historical subjects and landscapes, and his use of audacious strokes on cotton canvas creates representations that are “coded in injustice, disinvestment and the resilient fortitude of people who have endured tight constructions of identity.” His signature aesthetic—the brown-and-white juxtaposition of coffee and untreated raw cotton canvas against stylish swipes of eye-catching pigment—was born out of the scarcity he experienced in his early days in New York City. His use of coffee grounds has also made his art stand out, attracting patrons like LACMA, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney.

Although Hall has been a nomad for much of his life, raised across Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, Dubai and Los Angeles, he landed in New York just over ten years ago and has now planted deep roots. There has been a recent fervor in the art world for paintings by young Black artists, and Hall’s are arguably among the most recognizable and sought-after. As his star continues to rise, he said he’s in a place of gratitude for the ability to continue doing the work. Observer caught up with him on the eve of one of his most personal exhibitions, “Momma’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe,” which debuted at Vienna’s Galerie Eva Presenhuber late last month, to talk about his questioning of race and class structures in his work, his use of African coffee ground stains, and how fatherhood has changed his relationship to his art.

Your work largely examines the complexity of race and class, specifically your mixed-race heritage and growing up in communities where you saw a lot of wealth and privilege that you did not have access to. When you first began painting, were these the sort of topics that came to mind when you were looking for inspiration?

What first came to mind was more of a personal question. The first part of my life I spent in low-income and middle-income areas, and at that time, I wasn’t aware of some of the affluent areas that you mentioned. Later in my life, because I learned to oscillate between those class systems, I was always sort of in question. We moved around a lot, and this led to me learning quickly, and in that education, there was a lot of assimilation, code-switching and this sort of chameleon disarming ability that was used as a way to make friends. For me, the work has always been about questions of who I am, who I am becoming and how I am showing up in the world, plus some of these thorns I felt in my personal life and in the societies in which I lived. It’s a triangulation between self, nature versus nurture, but also the systemic history that we’re living in today.

In your paintings, you apply African coffee bean stain to raw cotton canvas, exposing your figures’ features. You first began using coffee grounds to paint portraits on the back of receipts at your barista job in high school. Can you tell me a little bit about your use of coffee and what drew you to it?

Coffee was something that I was really interested in when I was really young because it was something that my grandma would always warn me that it would stunt my growth and tell me not to drink it. When you can’t have something, you almost want it more, right? So I was always drawn to this kind of black magic, a kind of cauldron of coffee from a young age. And I also understood through these coffee shops that there were always these characters or personalities or conversations that were really interesting to me. The coffee shop always felt like this fertile soil for thought and creativity. When I started to understand more about the metaphoric reality of where these beans are being extracted from and what the benefits of that extraction are, I began to see the similarities between Black culture in America, from the beginning when they were kidnapped and brought here to now, thinking about athletics, rap music and even art. There was this world where the conceptual material became really interesting to me, and I wanted to galvanize some of those questions in my work by having the audacity to use an alternative material that wasn’t found in an art store. I didn’t have money to buy paint tubes, but I had coffee from the shop.

You’ve said that making art was the language you needed to “find reason and meaning” in areas of your life that once startled you. What were you specifically referring to and does your art still do that for you?

There was always this kind of pendulum from different class structures and racial spaces where I’d be with my white family in the boundary waters of Minnesota or my Black family in North Omaha and Saint Paul. I would always feel this sense of displacement, and through that, I found how these little micro traumas start to build up. At what point do they create this kind of tea kettling where your pressure inside is so high that you start crashing out in different areas of your life? It was a way to remediate that pressure, and I wanted a way to speak more clearly to what that place was. I don’t introduce myself and say, “Hey, I’m a mixed-race artist” or “Hey, I’m a Black artist”… I say, “Hey, I’m Chase.” After that, if it comes up, I’ll talk about me being an artist. The bracketing system that I think has always been a part of human history, let alone American history, is a way to navigate a sense of safety and understanding of where people move. I felt like if I could complicate that, there is a slowness and a way to actually create the fragmentation of the Black monolith. So when I looked at my own experience, I found that as I had to oscillate that pendulum I mentioned, and I have so much information about what that swing looks like. So why not speak honestly to that, instead of hoping that people don’t find out my mom is white or just being under this cloak of Blackness. To me, by operating under that cloak, I’m actually galvanizing the one-drop rule. As a way to slow down and complicate what Blackness is, it felt like an opportunity to speak truth.

In 2020, you landed a residency at MASS MoCA and a year later were picked as a member of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for Art and Style. In the GQ profile, you talked about how people were asking if you were happy because of all the success, but you felt conflicted because it was happening at the same time as George Floyd’s murder and the mass protests around the country. What was that time like for you, to have all this success against the backdrop of so much pain and racial injustice?

It reminds me of the saying “a rising tide raises all ships.” I never felt like “Oh I made it now”…it was more like I now have a chance to keep going, keep investigating, keep trying to speak truth to power and build language around what’s going on. Around this time, both of my parents were also incarcerated. So I’m 25, and I’m just trying to take care of my Great Dane and be a good boyfriend to my then-girlfriend. I was trying to deal with things as a human, and then you introduced the hypervisibility, and it complicated it, but I had always hoped that my art would take me to a place where I could continue to build language on the important things we need to talk about. Thinking about W.E.B. Du Bois’ double consciousness, it’s like, yes, all of that was very challenging, but people have been able to do great things with challenges throughout history. So I didn’t want what was going on to be a paralysis to me; instead, I thought it was a way for me to galvanize forward. It wasn’t a time to rest my hand but to pick up the brush and use it as a tool to spark conversations like this.

You became a girl dad just over ten months ago. How has fatherhood affected your art and the way you create? Does it make you think of legacy and lineage in a more urgent way?

I don’t know if I necessarily have quite hit the point of considering legacy because it’s still so day-to-day. We’re trying to make sure we’re doing things the best we can. But as I think about my relationship to art, it has made a lot of themes and symbols I see deeper. You think about the mother and child and the home, you think about single parenthood and you see parents in a totally different lens. It’s a hundred times more beautiful and impactful and also a hundred times harder than I would’ve ever imagined. It’s a really special new chapter, and it feels like I’m reliving my childhood through her. I’m seeing things I’ve taken for granted in a new light. Before, it’s kind of like you’re this lone wolf looking to figure out who you are, and now, it’s as if my heart lives outside of my body. Becoming a dad has changed everything in a really special and beautiful way.

There’s this notion that great art comes from pain—that the more tortured the artist, the better the work. Your art, while it grapples with past traumas, also holds joy. Specifically Black joy. Are you intentional about that?

I think the notion that the tortured artist makes great things is usually a part of the longing or grieving process. For example, because Tupac did great things and he died so young, we in a way fetishize or hold on to the songs he did make in his time because there are no more that are going to be made. I think because of that, it starts to become a marketing tactic in a way because when the person who makes these decisions, the gatekeepers, know there is a finite amount of the product, they can sell it and it’s more valuable monetarily. I think there are a lot of artists who are living who came from these types of backgrounds and who didn’t crash out in that way, and I hope I’m one of those. Someone who can take their life experience and continue to build an experience…and continue to share it as they go. I find that joy is a counterpart of gratitude in understanding that this is a very precious momentary experience. And I’m sharing what I care about, and I care about a lot of things that aren’t just detriment and premature Black death. I don’t really think about making really joyful artwork; I try to make work that is truthful. And in that truth, there are moments that are good and moments that are bad.

In a Vogue interview in 2022, you mentioned how the artist Sondra Perry told you, “You love Black history, but your mom is white. Where is that in the work?”—and that this kind of ruined you, but also made you. Can you tell me about that moment and what it meant to you as an artist?

Yeah, I think even earlier in this conversation, when we talked about dissecting the notion of the cloak or passing… until someone kind of calls you out, you’re never forced to grow. At a certain point, you have to get a little shakedown and see who you really are, instead of who you’re saying you are. For me, in those moments of critique, it was this kind of artistic shake that allowed me to go deeper. Someone who cares about you is going to demand the most of you, and if you are using language that is not necessarily as poignant as it could be, it’s good to ask what it’s going to take to get you there. Those talks with Sondra and that particular critique made me dig deeper and find a truth and stand on it, instead of standing on someone else’s block without the prerequisites. And since I didn’t go to college, I missed those moments of critique where people can help you on your journey… and it’s not always sugar-coated, which is okay and necessary.

“Momma’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe” is your second show with the gallery. Can you talk about the inspiration behind the work and what it means to you?

That title specifically comes from something that my dad would say when he would visit me when I was a kid, and it really shattered me in a way. But it also made me realize that throughout history, the mother figure versus the father figure has always been in all different types of class structures all over the world, and oftentimes it is this “Papa was a rolling stone” kind of idea. And that is hard to be the father of the home and help make the home a home… to go and split these roles with the maternal figure. I found that for me, with having a single mom, she had all of the trials and tribulations and could have given up on me, but she never did. I’m interested in how that term is this sort of pitfall of manhood throughout history, and it’s showing up constantly. Very few men in my life have not fucked up in a very serious way. Very few fathers of my friends have not messed up in a very serious way. I think this show is in the world of that “boys to men” idea, so there is this kind of evolution from the younger self into the middle-aged older self and what comes along with that. And how those challenges are what we have to focus on to become who we are going to be, while also speaking truth to the trope throughout history that Black fatherhood has always been fractured and fragmented due to many variables. The title of the show is just thinking about being and becoming, and as you grow, what else has to grow with you.