Chase Hall is a hot new artist to know

Upstate, Hall’s practice reached a new level of formal and conceptual depth. Hall and Rodriguez bought the place a few years ago, and when she got pregnant, they fled the East Village with their comically large Great Dane, Paisley. As we enter his immaculate workshop, which used to be a Bible binder’s factory and distillery, I can tell he’s taking advantage of the spacious digs to create the most ambitious works of his career; along one wall a length of raw canvas covered with rough outlines of charcoal runs 24 feet across. “When I came here, there was nothing — no electricity, no running water,” he says. Now, Hall says, he can access “growth elements for my practice that I only dreamed of.”

As a child, art was not one of Hall’s main concerns. On the contrary, he loved clothes. He remembers spending hours shopping at Ralph Lauren, imagining opening his own menswear boutique. Even then, Hall was well aware of what clothes say about the person underneath and how they can transform you into someone else.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hall had a peripatetic childhood. His father was in and out, and his mother, whom Hall warmly describes as a “rogue gangster woman,” was always on the move. For the first 16 years of their lives, 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 “fluctuations in class structures.” In other words: sometimes they were lucky, sometimes worse. Hall learned to take care of himself by living in what he calls a “survival illusion” that carried over into adulthood. “I’m very much like, 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, their daughter Henrietta and their dog Paisley.

By his late teens, Hall was living a crushing double life. He was a popular and handsome varsity lacrosse player at Malibu High School who took his classmate Gigi Hadid to prom. But in the 11th grade, when Hall’s mother got into trouble with the law, he said, they lost their home and a storage room filled with most of his possessions. Hall remembers it as a time when “everything was kind of falling apart.” When he wasn’t bouncing between friends’ houses, he lived in his car. Surrounded by wealth and privilege, the rare black surfer in a predominantly white beach town, Hall grappled with the complexities of race and class, leisure and belonging, as he now deftly portrays in his paintings.