Chase Hall is the hot new artist you need to know

Upstate, Hall’s practice reached new levels of formal and conceptual depth. Hall and Rodriguez bought the place several years ago, and when she became pregnant, they fled the East Village with their ridiculously large Great Dane, Paisley. As we enter his immaculate workshop, which formerly housed a Bible binding factory and a whiskey distillery, I can tell that he is using the spacious premises to create the most ambitious works of his career; along one wall, a piece of raw canvas covered with rough charcoal outlines extends 24 feet across. “When I came here, there was nothing here—no electricity, no running water,” he says. Now, Hall says, he can access “elements of growing my practice that I have only dreamed of.”

Growing up, art was not one of Hall’s main concerns. Instead, he loved clothes. He remembers spending hours walking through Ralph Lauren stores, dreaming of opening his own men’s clothing boutique. Even then, Hall was well aware of what clothes say about the person underneath, and how they can turn you into someone else.

Hall was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and spent a peripatetic childhood. His father was in and out, but his mother, whom Hall warmly describes as a “jocular gangster lady,” was always on the move. For the first 16 years of his life, the two of them lived in Minnesota, Chicago, Colorado, Las Vegas, Santa Monica and Malibu, and even spent six months in Dubai. Hall attended eight different schools and calls this period a “fluctuating class structure.” In other words: sometimes they were lucky, sometimes they were not. Hall learned to take care of himself by living in what he calls an “illusion of survival,” which carried over into adulthood. “I believe that if you can’t do it yourself, you have to figure out how to do it,” he says.

Hall with his wife Lauren Rodriguez Hall, daughter Henrietta and dog Paisley.

By the end of his teens, Hall was leading a dizzying double life. He was a popular and handsome lacrosse player at Malibu High School who asked his classmate Gigi Hadid to his prom. But in 11th grade, he said, when Hall’s mother got into trouble with the law, they lost the house and the storage unit filled with most of his belongings. Hall remembers this time as a time when “everything just kind of fell apart.” When he wasn’t bouncing between friends’ houses, he lived in his car. Surrounded by wealth and privilege, a rare black surfer in a predominantly white beach town, Hall navigated the complexities of race and class, leisure and belonging, as he now deftly portrays in his paintings.