Shawn Hall

As the late Barry Commoner put it, 'everything is connected to everything else'. I view my practice as an act of participation in the biological world through intuition and action, and work from the premise that everything is an event in nature. As a visual artist I both observe and imagine the natural world in its various facets, often from an up-close and even microscopic point of view. What is within and without us is teaming with biological drama that we are just a small part of. To a large extent my work is a kind of homage to this fact. On another level it's about the value and authority of my own experience. On another, it's about the language of drawing and invention of form. Then it circles back around to intuition and action, which is [my] nature.

Based in New Orleans for the past 16 years, my work has been shown widely in the USA. I hold an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art where I was a Patricia Harris Fellow, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an AS in Science from Delta College in MI (whose underpinnings have never left). I have been in residence at School 33 in Baltimore, in NYC through the LMCC, in Los Angeles at 18th Street Art Center, and at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New...

MFA Maryland Institute College of Art, Mount Royal School, Baltimore, Patricia Harris Fellow
BFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago
AS in Science, Delta College

selected [recent] exhibitions

2023
Cole Pratt Gallery, D.O.T.S. (discrete organic temporal suspensions), New Orleans, LA (solo)
2020
Cole Pratt Gallery, 100% Organic, New Orleans, LA (solo)
2019
SLU Contemporary Art Gallery, Liminal Landscapes, Southern LA University, Hammond, LA
Holden Art Center Gallery, Drawing Discourse, University of North Carolina, Asheville, NC
2018
ArtsUP! Concepts, Bees In Mind, Fort Lauderdale, FL (solo)
Prospect.4 Satellite @ Carrara Marble & Granite, Leavings: A Rachel David & Shawn Hall Collaboration, New Orleans, LA (solo)
Red Arrow Gallery, Contemporary Art Nashville, Nashville, TN
2017
Cole Pratt Gallery, A State of Natural Abstraction, New Orleans, LA (solo)
The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Whole Drum Will Sound: Women in Southern Abstraction, curated by Bradley Sumrall, New Orleans, LA
New Orleans Botanical Gardens, Response-Artists in the Park, New Orleans, LA
2016
Red Arrow Gallery, Involuntary Occurrences, Nashville, TN (solo)
Armory Art Center, Greenfield Gallery, Species Act, Part 1: Microscopic Invocation, West Palm Beach, FL (solo)
Armory Art Center, East Gallery, Recent Paintings, West Palm Beach, FL (solo)
Contemporary Art Center, A Building With A View: Experiments in Anarchite...