Biography

From the Exhibition Label for Timelapse: Doug Hall and the Western Landscape, 2013.

Doug Hall came to prominence in the early 1970s as a founding member (with Diane Andrews Hall and Jody Procter) of the San Francisco performance art collective T. R. Uthco. The group did numerous performances, interventions, and installations that were fueled by their satirical look at the mass media, pop culture, and politics of the era. Especially memorable was The Eternal Frame (1976), a collaborative project with Ant Farm in which they reenacted the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in a simulated super-8 footage of the event.  

Following the disbandment of T. R. Uthco in 1978, Hall moved on independently, and produced a significant body of work, particularly in video and video installation. In 1989, while working on the media installation People in Buildings, he began using large-format photography to document some of the institutional spaces he had videotaped. Photography has since become a central part of his practice.

Over the past three decades, Hall has addressed a wide range of subject matter: early stark images of governmental and bureaucratic spaces; lush photographs of Italian concert halls, archives, and museums that reflect his interest in the emergence of culture; scenes with people in proximity to natural and man-made monuments; portraits of people in the landscape and within dense urban settings. His latest work, Letters About Love, was shot in Prague, and is based on love letters between Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská.

Hall was born in 1944 in San Francisco, where he currently lives. He has an MFA in sculpture from the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (1969) and a BA in Anthropology from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1966).

In addition to the San Jose Museum of Art, Doug Hall’s work is included in the permanent collections of Berkeley Museum of Art, University of California, Berkeley; Berlinische Galerie, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Miami Art Museum; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Vienna; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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