Lee Hall: Immediate Landscapes

November 21, 2023 – May 5, 2024 | Rankin East and Rankin West Galleries

Lee Hall, Puglia: Sun Facade I, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 50inx50in (courtesy of Jerald Melberg Gallery)

Lee Hall (b. 1934, Lexington, NC; d. 2017, Northampton, MA) was a significant American painter, educator, author, and university leader. Best remembered for her abstracted landscapes and her tenure as President of the Rhode Island School of Design, Hall’s career ranged widely. Though her North Carolina roots remained strong throughout her life, the artist’s legacy as an abstract expressionist of southern extraction is firmly situated in the movement’s national and international story.

This exhibition brings together a range of Hall’s compositions and begs the question, “What constitutes a landscape?” Moreover, why is landscape as a concept and signifier so persistent across the visual cultures of the past and present? In the case of Hall’s paintings and collages, the artist uses broad swaths of color to build her compositions which are at once visually dense while also flattening the dynamic vistas she interpreted. The New England countryside, rural and urban Mediterranean scenes, and rigorous studies of anomalies in the landscape like quarries and waterways were perennial subjects.

Lee Hall, Connecticut River Valley, 2000, acrylic on canvas, 60inx48in (courtesy of Jerald Melberg Gallery)

Hall was one of only a few women exhibiting extensively in the post-war New York art scene. Following her graduation from the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina in 1955 (now UNC-Greensboro), she pursued graduate and doctoral studies at New York University while ingratiating herself to an already canonized milieu of abstract expressionist celebrities. A member of the New York School of painters, Hall quickly found success exhibiting at the preeminent Betty Parsons Gallery and developed a lifelong friendship with the gallerist.

However, Hall was unnerved by the increasing commodification of artworks in the mid-20th century and so turned to academia. Her studio practice would continue at pace though, and she developed a singular representational approach to her modernist landscapes. In these galleries you can find examples of the artist’s work across scale and medium, including her stain-like approach to applying paint in the 1970s through the diminutive but no less nuanced collage compositions that characterize her later career.

This exhibition is made possible by loans from Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC. Special thanks is owed to Mary Melberg for her keen insight and generous collaboration.