Ben Hall
Ben Hall ’04 is a chef/activist/artist based in Detroit. Hall’s work revolves around the forms community takes. Particularly at the Russell Street Deli, a 30-year-old heritage restaurant in Detroit’s "Eastern Market", which Hall owns and operates as a long-term sited project dealing with labor structures, how capital routes itself, and hierarchical power structures.
Biography
Hall is a chef/activist/artist based in Detroit. Hall’s work revolves around the forms community takes. Particularly at the Russell Street Deli, a 30-year-old heritage restaurant in Detroit’s "Eastern Market", which Hall owns and operates as a long-term sited project dealing with labor structures, how capital routes itself, and hierarchical power structures.
As a chef, Hall produced the first fully integrated, serially repeated, chef-driven school meal in a major municipality producing a vegan, soy-free, gluten-free soup, at cost, for children at Detroit Public Schools where 55,000 students eat for free and 88% are financially eligible for school lunch. Hall is in the process of repeating this in Houston, Texas, where 165,000 children will eat three different soups every two weeks under the federally mandated nutritional and financial guidelines.
As an artist, Hall most recently presented a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and performed at the Moers Jazz Festival as a core member of Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain orchestra project. Hall also founded and organizes Bap-tizum.com, the largest Black/AfAm spiritual music archive in the world. He was a visiting faculty member at Bennington for Fall 2018 and returned as a research fellow for the Building a Community Curriculum: A Complex Systems Approach to Food Insecurity for the 2019-2022 academic years.