Memorial to African American Surfing History and Future
Chase Hall is an American artist.
Artist BioChase Hall proposes to produce a 10-foot bronze sculpture at Santa Monica’s Bay Street Beach. The site is an important beachfront zone historically accessible to racial minorities during periods of segregation. Installed permanently at the intersection of Bay Street and Ocean Boulevard, the sculpture will be a lasting tribute to legacies of early figures such as Nicolás Rolando Gabaldón, who were influential to the historically white-dominated sport of surfing, and ongoing Black adventurism within this space. The addition of the sculpture will function as a prominent meeting point for community members, reinforce representation of Black and Brown surfers within California’s cultural topography, and raise public awareness of the site’s historic and ongoing significance for Black and Brown Angelenos. The $50,000 Creative Capital grant is expected to cover the project’s onset costs spanning the initial design and development phase. Chase Hall, community leaders, and the extended arts community will raise the remaining funds to complete the development and installation of the project.
Chase Hall
New York, New York
Chase Hall received the Creative Capital Award in 2024. Chase Hall’s (b. 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota) paintings and sculptures engage personal and material histories to complicate traditional understandings of race, class, mixedness, and geography within historically-charged social landscapes. A central body of paintings, made with drip-brew techniques derived from coffee beans and acrylic pigments on cotton, centers post-victimhood and liberation by portraying Black figures engaged in intense moments of kinship, tension, and self-renewal. Chase Hall was the subject of a solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia in 2023. In 2022, Hall was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to produce a large-scale artwork for its opera house in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; ICA Miami; Fondation Louis Vuitton; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum; High Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Walker Art Center; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Whitney Museum of American Art.