The Parrish Art Museum Announces Latest FRESH PAINT Exhibition with Artist Chase Hall
October 1, 2026–January 25, 2027
Water Mill, NY | September 23, 2026 – For the eighth iteration of the collaborative FRESH PAINT exhibition series, the Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation are pleased to present work by artist Chase Hall (American, b. 1993 in St. Paul, Minnesota). For his FRESH PAINT presentation, Hall has created a new painting, The Affrilachian Mountains (2026), that will be exhibited for the first time at the Parrish.
For over ten years, Hall has created figurative paintings that explore the multifaceted nature of life, culture, and history. Though the paintings depict fictional characters, they are also rooted in Hall’s personal experience. “A lot of these start with archetypal representations of a self seen through different narratives, landscapes, and types of people,” the artist explains. “Oftentimes, I’m thinking of family members or friends, brotherhood, and this idea of being and becoming.” Whether presented through traditional portraiture or engaged in scenes of athleticism, physical labor, community gathering, or even myth and fantasy, Hall’s figures are typically depicted at life scale, imbuing them with a sense of humanity and creating a direct relationship to the viewer.
In The Affrilachian Mountains, the artist responds to the period following the abolition of enslavement in the late nineteenth century, when thousands of African Americans migrated to the Appalachians in the eastern United States to find work in the region’s coal fields. Depicting a scene of miners gathered together, the painting stems from Hall’s longstanding interest in the human impulse to recognize collective histories, endeavors, and accomplishments through photography and group portraiture. His incorporation of found objects—antique agricultural tools and rusted food tins that once housed coffee, tobacco, and malt liquor—points to the complicated histories of labor and commodity production in the United States.
Hall’s compositions emerge from his improvisational approach to painting. The figures are not pre-planned but take shape as the artist works the canvas. The spontaneous nature of their creation is also dictated by the inherently unpredictable nature of the materials Hall uses: freshly brewed coffee on raw cotton. Whereas traditional paints like oil and acrylic “behave for the brush and the artist,” Hall explains that “working with a beverage that’s boiling, it wants to run off the painting immediately.” The aqueous medium necessitates “a kind of corralling” and rapid decision making on Hall’s part, resulting in a range of marks, from stained fields of amber and burnt umber to wiry linear brushstrokes that lend the compositions their crackling sense of movement.
Hall is drawn to coffee not only for its tonal range, but also for its political associations. Taken from Africa and brought to the Americas in the eighteenth century, the coffee
seed parallels the histories of Hall’s own ancestors, and painting with the beverage allows him to engage with its ties to colonialism, extraction, labor, and wealth production. At the same time, Hall’s use of coffee as a painting medium lifts it out of its typical context of trade and consumption, adding new layers to its history.
Much of Hall’s project is about giving form to duality. Born to a Black father and white mother, the artist reflects on his own biracial identity in his work, exploring the
conditions of constantly navigating a hybrid state. While many of his paintings address histories of labor, Hall also represents his subjects in the midst of leisure activities: they sport tennis racquets and surfboards, race on horseback, and drift in the ocean alongside marine life. There is an undeniable sense of freedom in these scenes, which
posit identity not as a servant to boundaries and classifications, but as a space of expansive possibility.
FRESH PAINT is a rotating series of single-artwork exhibitions at the Parrish that spotlight new or rarely exhibited works by both emerging and established artists. By
circumventing traditional exhibition planning timelines—which can extend years into the future—FRESH PAINT provides a platform for artists to promptly showcase freshly created artworks and ideas, allowing for a more direct response to current issues and cultural movements. This approach fosters a timelier dialogue between the Museum, visitors, and our surrounding community. Presented in the Parrish’s Creativity Lounge located in the Lobby, FRESH PAINT is open to the public at no charge during regular Museum hours. Each FRESH PAINT installation is also accompanied by a commissioned interpretative text by an invited author, critic, poet, or scholar. This iteration of FRESH PAINT will feature a new interview between Hall and British writer, curator, and broadcaster Ekow Eshun.
FRESH PAINT: Chase Hall is organized by Scout Hutchinson, The FLAG Art Foundation Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Parrish Art Museum, in collaboration with Jon Rider, Director; Caroline Cassidy, Deputy Director; and Madeline DeFilippis, Exhibitions and Programs Manager, at FLAG.
Exhibition Support
FRESH PAINT: Chase Hall is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous support of The FLAG Art Foundation.
The Parrish Art Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and by the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.
Image Caption: Chase Hall, The Affrilachian Mountains, 2026. Acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas, pitchfork, shovel, can, coffee canisters, tobacco pouch, and wire. Overall: 96 x 110 x 8 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Photography: Christopher Stach.
