Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Video, Sculpture, Installation
Website: michaelhallstudio.net
Michael Hall is a painter, drawer, and multimedia artist born in San Diego to military parents, an upbringing that took him to Japan, Russia, England, and France before he settled in the Bay Area. He received his BFA in Painting from the California College of the Arts in 1996 and his MFA in Painting and Video from Mills College in Oakland in 2008. He lives and works in Berkeley, California, with his partner, the artist Julia Goodman.
Hall is an Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting at California State University East Bay, a position he has held since 2016. Prior to that appointment, he taught at UC Berkeley, Mills College, and the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art in France. From 2003 to 2016 he was a faculty member at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, where he founded the organization’s first video production workshop for artists with developmental disabilities.
His awards and fellowships include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2010), an MFA Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2008), the Alameda County Arts Leadership Award (2014), and a Lucas Artist Residency Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center (2015). He was a resident at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in 2016 and at Recology AIR in San Francisco in 2025. He has been nominated for the SFMOMA SECA Award in 2012, 2017, 2022, and 2023.
Hall’s work centers on personal and mass-produced objects transformed by use, time, and the particularity of their histories. His drawings, paintings, and videos examine how everyday items—books, records, consumer goods, found ephemera—accumulate meaning through their idiosyncratic wear and tear, functioning simultaneously as markers of time and place and as vessels for personal memory, collective desire, and cultural history. He approaches the act of rendering as a deliberate counterweight to disposability, using patient observation and meticulous depiction to slow what he describes as “the inevitable march of time.”
Across series, Hall moves fluidly between mediums while maintaining a consistent preoccupation with objects that bridge communication and human connection. Works such as Let Love In (2022) combine oil on linen with hand-carved shelves, books, brass figurines, and QR-code-linked videos—layering actual objects with painted representation. His Song Cycle assemblages, made during his Recology residency from materials salvaged from the public recycling facility, incorporate trompe-l’oeil flourishes, mirror fragments, and interactive sound elements to reward close, sustained looking. His concrete sculptures in the Surrogate series reference brutalist military architecture and WWII-era Pacific Coast defensive installations, while also functioning as planters seeded with indigenous vegetation. Throughout, Hall’s practice reflects an interest in finding empathy and complexity within polarized situations, whether the subject is domesticity and parenthood, military history, or the ephemera of daily life.
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