SCAD University Press announces the release of Chase Hall: The Close of Day
Published on the occasion of Hall’s first solo institutional exhibition, presented at the SCAD Museum of Art, the catalogue provides new insight on the artist’s practice and cultural impact.
SAVANNAH, GEORGIA — SCAD University Press, the imprint of the Savannah College of Art and Design, announces the release of Chase Hall: The Close of Day, a monograph commemorating Hall’s first solo institutional exhibition, presented at the SCAD Museum of Art, Feb. 28–Aug. 21, 2023. The exhibition united 20 new and recent paintings and two site-related installations that mine myriad cultural references, iconography, and figures of the past and present to address global issues rooted in race and labor in relation to commodities like coffee and cotton. The catalogue features a foreword by SCAD President and Founder Paula Wallace, an essay by Daniel S. Palmer, chief curator of the SCAD Museum of Art, and a conversation between Hall and Larry Ossei-Mensah.
“One of the initial ideas of the show was to encapsulate the last ten years as an artist and what it means to give yourself over to something—at the close of the day, to have known you left it all in your work, or left it all on the field,“ said Hall. “I give everything to my work and want to take a second to say thank you to everyone who has supportedme on this journey.”
Throughout The Close of Day, readers delve into Hall’s practice, which interrogates the realities of race in America through innovative figurative painting techniques. Using coffee grounds as pigment on raw cotton canvases, Hall varies the levels of coarseness and fineness of the ground beans to achieve a range of tonal values, metaphorically articulating a non-monolithic Black experience. The catalogue also contextualizes Hall’s installation work in the exhibition, which included a century-old, self-playing Wurlitzer organ positioned within a custom brick room referencing the museum’s historic structure and the enslaved people who built it.
“The generosity and drive with which Hall created this exhibition, and the thoughtful, reflective manner that he brought to sharing it with the thousands of SCAD students and public audiences who engaged with it, speak to his awareness of the importance and opportunities of presenting his first solo museum exhibition at a teaching institution like the SCAD Museum of Art,” said Palmer. “We are honored to bring The Close of Day to the world in book form and hope that it continues to encourage societal dialogue with every page turned.”
Published by SCAD University Press with the SCAD Museum of Art, Chase Hall: The Close of Day is co-produced by David Kordansky Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and SCAD. David Kordansky Gallery will host an artist talk and book signing, Sept. 7, 10 a.m., at 520 W. 20th St., New York.
Chase Hall: The Close of Day is available for purchase now at shopSCAD.com.
For more information on current and past exhibitions as well as upcoming fall programs at the SCAD Museum of Art, visit scadmoa.org.
About the artist
Chase Hall’s paintings and sculptures respond to generational celebrations and traumas encoded throughout American history. Interrogating a variety of social and visual systems, each of which intersects with complex trajectories of race, hybridity, economics, and personal agency, Hall generates images whose materiality is as crucial to their compositional makeup as their indelible approach to representation. A central body of paintings, made with drip-brew techniques derived from coffee beans and acrylic pigments on cotton supports, is notable for both its conceptual scope and its intimacy. The use of brewed coffee carries powerful symbolic weight as it evokes centuries-old geopolitical systems associated with the commodification of a plant native to Africa. In Hall’s hands, it also becomes a means of achieving subtle visual textures, a range of brown skin tones, and a mark-making vocabulary precipitated on the closeness of touch. Above all, it is the artist’s improvisational willingness to immerse himself in the indefinable personal hieroglyphics of each picture that gives his work its resonance and impact.
Hall was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to produce a large-scale work for its opera house in New York. His monumental diptych Medea Act I & II (2022) was on view at the Met Opera through June 2023. Hall’s work has been included in group exhibitions
including Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, University of Illinois Chicago; and This Is America | Art USA Today, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Hall has been an artist in residence at The Mountain School of Arts, Los
Angeles; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. His work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
SCAD Museum of Art
The SCAD Museum of Art features more than 10 dynamic gallery spaces presenting exhibitions and commissioned works by international emerging and established artists. The museum serves visitors and students alike, enriching both the high caliber of education at SCAD and the cultural life of the Savannah community and beyond. Exhibitions range from painting, sculpture, and photography to digital media, fashion, and jewelry, complementing the artistic disciplines offered at the university. The museum also hosts public programming year-round, including lectures, gallery talks, workshops, and film screenings.
SCAD MOA has presented exhibitions by artists including Miya Ando, Radcliffe Bailey, Nick Cave, Doreen Lynette Garner, Katharina Grosse, Subodh Gupta, Hassan Hajjaj, Chase Hall, Alfredo Jaar, Isaac Julien, Shirin Neshat, Rashaad Newsome, Raúl de Nieves, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, Rose B. Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kehinde Wiley, and Saya Woolfalk, as well as site-specific installations by Rachel Feinstein, Jorge Pardo, Odili Donald Odita, Daniel Arsham, Jose Dávila, and others.
An award-winning architectural icon, the museum attracts visitors from around the world to the heart of Savannah’s vibrant downtown historic district and incorporates the oldest surviving pre-Civil War railroad depot into its striking contemporary design. Recognized with awards from the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, the Congress for the New
Urbanism, the International Interior Design Association, and the Historic Savannah Foundation, the museum received the American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Architecture, a pinnacle achievement.
Established in 2011, the museum’s Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies celebrates the imaginative breadth and expressive legacy of African American art and culture. In the decade since its founding, the Evans Center and SCAD MOA have presented internationally heralded exhibitions focused on the legacies of Elizabeth Catlett, Frederick Douglass, Aaron Douglas, and Jacob Lawrence, as well as contemporary exhibitions by artists including Hank Willis Thomas, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Matthew Angelo Harrison, and Kenturah Davis. Visit scadmoa.org.
SCAD University Press
SCAD University Press is an award-winning publisher of books on art, design, and the creative industries. Recent titles include Kenturah Davis: Everything That Cannot Be Known; Ring Redux: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection; and Seven Lessons for Dreamers & Makers.
SCAD: The University for Creative Careers
SCAD is a private, nonprofit, accredited university, offering 100 graduate and undergraduate degree programs across locations in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; Lacoste, France; and online via SCADnow. SCAD enrolls more than 16,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 120 countries. The future-minded SCAD curriculum engages professional-level technology and myriad advanced learning resources, affording students opportunities for internships, professional certifications, and real-world assignments with corporate partners through SCADpro, the university’s renowned research lab and prototype generator.
SCAD is No. 1 in the U.S., according to Art & Object’s 2023 Best Art Schools ranking, with additional top rankings for degree programs in interior design, architecture, film, fashion, digital media, and more. Career success is woven into every fiber of the university, resulting in a superior alumni employment rate. For the past six years, 99% of SCAD graduates were employed, pursuing further education, or both within 10 months of graduation. SCAD provides students and alumni with ongoing career support through personal coaching, alumni programs, a professional presentation studio, and more. Visit scad.edu.
