Concerned with the contemporary reinterpretation of history and historical artifacts, Michael Hall creates paintings, sculpture and videos that examine the struggle between control and protection, nostalgia and the mythic image. Whether recontextualizing California coastal landscape painting to reveal it’s hidden and deteriorating military past or documenting the excess and loss of the physical photographic object, Hall’s work explores our pathos for the past while investigating our relationship to it in the present.

Hall, who was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2010, has held recent solo exhibitions at venues including Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Southern Exposure, and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Rental Gallery, San Francisco; and Blankspace Gallery, Oakland. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, at venues including Swarm Gallery, LoBot Gallery, 21 Grand, Oakland; Ore Projectz, San Francisco; and New Image Art Gallery, Los Angeles. Hall received his BFA from the California College of the Arts, and his MFA from Mills College.

He was born in San Diego, California to military parents and has lived around the world in Japan, Russia, England, and Spain among others. For the past eight years he has worked at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland where he began the first video production class for artists with developmental disabilities. He also teaches painting at Mills College in Oakland and is a curator at Southern Exposure in San Francisco.