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Roscoe Hall

Birmingham, Alabama

A person stands near a pot on a stove in this loosely painted, busy, crowded composition. A second person looks through a window opening on the far side of the stove, and a third enters along the left edge. The background is painted with swipes and smudges of snow white, carnation pink, inky black, navy blue, and lemon yellow.

Doin Too Much

2025

Four people standing in a row in descending height look out at us in front of a canary-yellow background in this loosely painted composition. Their bodies are outlined in black, and their faces and hands painted with dabs and strokes in electric purple, brown, scarlet red, and black.

4 of The Scottsboro 9

2024

Thirteen people sit, stand, or lie on the ground in front of two cabins in this loosely painted scene. A fourteenth person sits on one of the roofs under a bright red balloon. All the people wear lapis-blue pants and white T-shirts and have brown skin. The ground and trees behind the cabins are painted with daubs and slashes of saturated rainbow tones.

What's Goin' On

2023

A person’s roughly and loosely painted face nearly fills this vertical portrait. The skin is built with streaks of black, brown, dark yellow, fuchsia pink, and pale lilac purple. The person holds a black pipe in his mouth and wears a white garment and brimless white cap against a background of coral red across the center and turquoise blue above.

No Farting

2023

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Roscoe Hall

The artist sits facing the camera with his hand to his chin at a work table, with various painting supplies and deli cups filled with paint water. Roscoe is Black with a salt-and-pepper beard. He wears a black baseball cap, black glasses, and a graphic tshirt. Behind him is a large figurative painting just out of focus.

Roscoe Hall (b. 1978, Chicago, IL) is a multidisciplinary artist and chef based in Birmingham, Alabama. His practice moves between painting and culinary work, treating food, memory, and material construction as interconnected systems of image making. His background in kitchens, including Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA, and barbecue institutions across the American South, informs a process-driven approach rooted in repetition and improvisation. In the studio, he builds layered media works using denim, paper towels, charcoal, wine, pastels, and food-based pigments. The surfaces operate as accumulations of gesture, residue, and time rather than fixed images. Recent solo exhibitions include Speak Into Existence (2023), Eidetic Recipes (2024), and Thank You (2025). Across these projects, his practice explores how material can hold layered histories through process, fragmentation, and reflection.

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 2026

Website / Social Links

“ I believe that by making things that are very personal, they become universal. The day-by-day experience of making this work, even though it may seem to carry layers of history, is really a cover for what I am dealing with right now. Today. Yesterday. What is coming tomorrow. The mystery of history is that it is never finished. Neither is this work.”