Chase Hall’s New Coffee Painting Gets Into the History of Black Appalachia

Summary

American artist Chase Hall has created a new work, titled “The Affrilachian Mountains” (2026), for Parrish Art Museum and FLAG Art Foundation's exhibition series

The piece explores racialized histories of labor, commodity, and trade through its subjects and materials, comprising found objects and coffee as pigment

The painting is now on view at the Parrish Art Museum in New York until January 25, 2027

Chase Hall, the American artist known for his paintings made of freshly brewed coffee, once said that he’d pull up to 100 espresso shots for a single composition. The unique material was spurred by his experience as a barista, but the fields of amber and burnt umber that emerged spoke to more than just his love for the stuff — they carried him through histories of colonialism, trade, and labor.

The Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation recently tapped Hall to create a new painting for the latest FRESH PAINT exhibition, running until January 25, 2027. Hall figures a group of miners in the resulting work, “The Affrilachian Mountains” (2026), exploring the post-abolition period, which saw thousands of African Americans migrate to the Appalachians in search of work in the coal fields.

Like many of Hall’s energetic figurations, the base employs acrylic and coffee — brewed and burnt to achieve rich palettes — on unprimed canvas, made to appear as if bursting with white paint. This particular piece also involves a number of found objects — antique agricultural tools and rusted tins that once housed coffee, tobacco, and malt liquor — putting pressure on the wounds of American histories as they relate to commodity, extraction, and race.

Being biracial, much of Hall’s oeuvre, which spans the personal to generational, visions of labor and leisure, gives form to duality, not only reckoning with in-between states, but the codes and conditions that undergird racial being. “There is an undeniable sense of freedom in these scenes, which posit identity not as a servant to boundaries and classifications,” the Parrish Art Museum wrote, “but as a space of expansive possibility.”

“When I really break it down, I trust what I’m doing in my studio, and what I want to say; my practice is about making space for my younger self, but also making space for a more open, critical, and nuanced world,” Hall adds in a conversation with writer and curator Ekow Eshun. “This is just my place. I can yell back at the world, and hopefully it’s enacting something that makes it better than I found it.”

Chase Hall’s iteration of FRESH PAINT is now on view in New York.

Parrish Art Museum
279 Montauk Hwy,
Water Mill, NY 1197