Alumni News

Hall ’04 To Exhibit at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

Alumnus Ben Hall '04 was profiled in the Detroit Free Press last month after being the only local artist selected for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit's exhibition "Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism," which will be on display through Friday, December 30.

Museum director and curator Luis Croquer, who selected Hall and about 40 other international artists for the exhibition, said, "His projects are diverse, and he's consistent. He's using found materials, making social connections and speaking to city life. He also has a great capacity to make his own proposals, to not come up with something too literal or locked in itself. It's universal and very layered."

Hall, who is also a serious jazz musician and co-owner of the Russell Street Deli with alumnus Jason Murphy '09, "makes large, beguiling sculptures from found materials like turntables, basketball hoops, fire hoses and fur pelts with their heads still attached," the Free Press wrote. "He also makes disarmingly beautiful drawings and prints by burning paper to create the marks and transferring oxidized color from rusty plates."

Hall studied music and art at Bennington, and started graduate school in art this fall at Columbia University.

To view some of his work, see his website