Chase Hall’s imagined miners bring coffee, cotton and tools into dialogue
The Affrilachian Mountains is the eighth single-work FRESH PAINT presentation at Parrish Art Museum, on view in Water Mill, New York, through January 25, 2027.
Chase Hall’s The Affrilachian Mountains is on view at Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, from October 1, 2026, to January 25, 2027. It is the eighth presentation in FRESH PAINT, the museum’s collaboration with the FLAG Art Foundation. One new work provides the focus, rather than a large retrospective. A group of miners, coffee stains and actual tools share a single composition.
Born in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1993, Hall explores race, memory and group relationships through figurative painting. These miners are an imagined group, rather than a documentary gathering whose members can be individually identified. The historical reference is the experience of thousands of African Americans who moved into Appalachian coal mining in the late nineteenth century, after abolition. That context does not turn this painting into a reconstruction of a specific recorded meeting.
Coffee is a working material, not just a background colour
The official medium includes acrylic and coffee on raw cotton canvas, with a pitchfork, shovel, can, coffee canisters, tobacco pouch and wire. The work measures 96 by 110 inches, with an overall depth of 8.5 inches. Instead of only depicting labouring tools, it lets objects and painting occupy the same wall. Looking involves both the flat image and the thickness extending outwards.
Coffee penetrates raw cotton differently from acrylic sitting on the surface, producing changes in tone and edges. Uncovered cotton also contributes light areas and should not automatically be understood as white paint. Hall’s process lets spreading material interact with immediate decisions. The resulting marks prevent the figures from becoming uniformly filled illustrations; the group appears assembled through different speeds of making.
Read the formation from afar, then the individual lines
The complete image shows several figures facing forwards, while tools on either side pull attention beyond the canvas. Details reveal striped clothing, facial lines and shoe textures. Sharing a formation does not make every person identical. Browns and other blocks of colour alternate across the group, holding collective presence and individual difference together. This is a way of looking at the image, rather than an attempt to assign identities to fictional figures.
A detail reveals faces, clothing, coffee marks, lines and blocks of colour.The lower detail shows trouser legs, shoes and patterned ground.
The FRESH PAINT Creativity Lounge is in the museum lobby and is officially free during regular museum hours. That does not mean all galleries are free or that the interior remains accessible when the museum is closed. Regular hours are Thursday–Monday, 11am–5pm, with Tuesday and Wednesday closures. A December 5 noon tour with curator Scout Hutchinson is also listed; its participation arrangements should be checked separately.
Visiting Water Mill and changing your viewing distance
The address is 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, New York 11976, rather than a Manhattan venue. Consult the official Parrish Chase Hall exhibition page for the calendar and visiting arrangements. For those familiar only with a phone thumbnail, this single-work display offers a change of distance: first take in the relationship between group and tools, then return to cotton, coffee and individual contours. The work can raise questions about labour and history without being mistaken for a documentary photograph.
