Reuben Hale created art over each of his nine decades, working in various media including painting, printmaking, photography, holography, and sculpture. He trained in realism and abstract expressionism, developing a strong figurative style. His fascination with kinetic and optical art led to holography work and using optical glass in sculpture.
Hale believed the most significant sociological development of the 20th century was women's emergence in society. His "Emerging Woman" theme, developed through experimentation, aimed to express this truth.
"Much of my work," Hale stated, "deals with changes in female status. Images show a full-grown female embryo or a female emerging through a membrane, avoiding turmoil or anguish. The figure functions comfortably with internal strength."
He explored this subject from the 1960s onwards, as seen in his abstract expressionist painting Untitled (1969) and sculptures like Nascent Woman (1988) and Walking Woman (1990). His commission for Palm Beach International Airport, Progression (1992), features 18 full-size figures emerging en masse.
"The youth of his female sculptures," says artist and former student Anne Carlisle, "reflected the promise of the future. Reuben believed that the liberation of women would change society and the world."
Reuben Aldridge Hale, Jr., born in 1927 in Belzoni, Mississippi, moved to Greenwood in 1934. His skill as an artist and leader was evident from those first years, conducting his first-grade class orchestra and winning an art exhibit the following year at age seven or eight. Despite lacking formal art education, Hale thrived, creating commissioned work for local schools and churches, and developing a keen interest in nature, sketching insects, trees, and birds.
Known for his daring personality, Hale enjoyed jumping from rooftops, a skill that later served him well in Navy parachute training. His early artwork included a bust of his father, created from rough clay from his grandmother's farm. Greenwood artist Lalla Walker Lewis was his first art teacher, and Hale's work was featured in the city's first civic art exhibition in 1938.
In high school, Hale led the school paper's art department and created his c. 1944 sketches Malmaison (Chief Greenwood Leflore's Home) and Chief Greenwood Leflore's Carriage, both still distributed today as postcards in visitor bureaus and museums across Mississippi. He also directed the school band and twice guest-conducted the Jackson Symphony Orchestra at the invitation of visiting Maestro Fritz Reiner. A dedicated Boy Scout, Hale earned Eagle Scout honors and sponsorships to civic activities such as participating in Boys' State in Jackson, MS, and serving as honorary Mayor of Greenwood for a week with "real official duties," he recalled. A skilled boxer, he sparred throughout high school and college, narrowly missing a Golden Gloves competition due to bad weather. "Two months later, I fought the guy who won the welterweight title and beat him by decision," Hale said.
After graduating high school in 1945, Hale served in the U.S. Navy during WWII on the seaplane tender, USS Albemarle. While based in the Philippines on a remote island off Calicoan while the ship was being repaired, he discovered some paint supplies and spent his free time creating seascapes, portraits and lettering for his fellow sailors. After an honorable discharge, Hale served five years in the Naval Reserve and attended the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) on the GI Bill in 1946, pledging to Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
"No college taught anything in art, especially in Mississippi," he said, "but I decided to try college at Ole Miss in Oxford as my father, mother and grandfather were all alumni there." He declared a double major in Business and Literature but spent more time at poker, parties and dances. "It was known as a party school and I did my best to enhance its reputation," he wrote, but called it a "stupid time." To refocus, Hale transferred briefly to the Memphis Academy of Art before attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1949.
Some of Hale's instructors at SAIC included Elmer A. Forsberg and Lucien F. "Luke" Pawlowski. While attending art school full-time, Hale took additional night and weekend classes, excelling in figure drawing and painting. He enjoyed sculpting but found the market limited to large park sculptures, which was not of interest to him, so he put his energy into portraiture which people were buying.
One class assignment he recalled was to go to any gallery in the museum and do a drawing. While most of his peers did a simple drawing of one piece of artwork, Hale wanted to draw Blackstone Hall, the museum's largest gallery and two stories tall. "It was enormous with Egyptian sculptures and architecture throughout," he said. "I chose to sit at one end and draw the entire gallery and everything in it. I wanted to do a value drawing, using a crow quill pen and ink and build up the value with cross hatching." It hung at SAIC for years, he later wrote but was unaware whether it survived.
Students then entered via the main lion-guarded Art Institute doors on Michigan Avenue. The daily mile-long walk through the galleries deeply affected Hale. "The immediate contact with paintings in the museum" caused "a sense of unrest" to manifest in his work during that first year of formal art study, he later recalled. Despite offers from an art agency and an invitation to collaborate with Robert Rauschenberg, he chose to finish his studies.
"My plans," wrote Hale in his memoirs, "were to finish the Art Institute, go to Paris for about a year, come back and live and work in New York, and paint where I could pursue new movements. The Art Institute was a little behind time, and the emphasis was still on realism, but I still thought I should finish there before anything else."
During school breaks, Hale was a regular visitor to New York. "I'm sure that was when Reuben met Dylan Thomas," says Irma, Reuben's daughter. "Reuben hung out at the Cedar Tavern. He knew all the abstract expressionists, Klein and de Kooning, and all the drunks," says Anne Carlisle, who studied with him in the 1970s.
In 1953, Hale married dancer Marie Stoner and Irma was born, profoundly impacting the young father. "When I first held Irma, she changed my life forever," he wrote. "I thought she was so miraculous and wonderful I couldn't get over it. I never thought that such a little thing like that could have such an effect on me. I loved her from the first time I saw her, and seeing about her became the most important thing in my life."
The new family moved back to Greenwood and opened The School of Ballet and Art which became a hub for local artistic activity. Hale taught painting, organized exhibitions, and served as president of the Mississippi Delta Art Association. Hale invited Mississippi artists who had not previously exhibited in Greenwood to show their work, and lecturers from art departments of colleges around the state to speak. He exhibited his students' work around the state; and invited art students from the Delta, the state and abroad to show in Greenwood. Marie choreographed and taught a different full-length ballet for the school to perform, while Reuben designed, built and painted sets, designed and set up lights, and designed costumes and drew patterns for the seamstresses.
He and Marie were both able to commute to Chicago to continue their respective art studies. But Hale recalled the Greenwood period as a seven-year career of portrait painting in which he was dissatisfied. It was the time when the greatest changes in art were taking place; "new sensitivities were being formed," he wrote, "and at that point portraiture became but a shadow of art." Dogmas were simply replacing one another, and he craved "a more spontaneous approach to expressing his visual experiences." That opportunity, he believed, would be with the New York painters, however moving there was not something he could afford.
Throughout what would be their last year in Greenwood, he worked on various projects, including illustrating a book on the wheat industry. Disillusioned after a competing concept beat them to the press, Hale decided to use the project's earnings to fund his graduate studies, a decision influenced by Warren Brandt, abstract expressionist artist and Cedar Tavern regular. Brandt was one of the many artists and academics Hale had invited to speak and exhibit in Greenwood. On the heels of being chairman of art at Ole Miss, Brandt had been elected by Southern Illinois University (SIU) at Carbondale to do the same.
Hale concluded at Brandt's urging, that the new program would "offer the qualities found in New York painters," beyond what continuing at the Art Institute could do. Hale and his family moved to Carbondale, where he began graduate coursework in the fall of 1960 and teaching university classes himself. As art critic Gerrit Henry wrote decades later, Brandt turned the art department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale "into one of the finest in the country."
One of Hale's teachers, expressionist painter Al Newbill, encouraged Hale to break free from "old intellectual concepts," leading to his "creative rebirth" and spontaneous, intuitive painting. Hale's thesis emphasized that art must combine the visual and spiritual, with shape and elements like line and value holding intrinsic psychological power. Newbill became a close friend of the Hale family, was a frequent visitor to their home, and played imaginative drawing games with young Irma. Hale also studied with abstract expressionist painters Hans Hofmann and Paul Burlin, and sculptors David Slivka and Reuben Nakian. In 1960, he created Sleeping Woman, a small bronze sculpture; and Marie, a miniature bust of his wife.
Hale was already teaching in Florida when he received his MFA from SIU. He'd had offers to teach at New York University and University of South Florida (USF), and Marie's vote for the warmer weather won out. Because USF's new division of fine arts did not expect to have a building for another year, he accepted an interim position beginning Fall 1961 at Palm Beach Junior College (PBJC) in Lake Worth, FL. It was so last-minute, he recalled arriving at a motel after midnight, sneaking the family pets into their room by suitcase before starting work hours later.
When a year had passed, because Marie loved teaching at her ballet school in Palm Beach so much, Hale let USF know that he would not be teaching there after all. At PBJC he also declined offers to lead the art department, preferring to teach and focus on his painting. In the summertime he remained in Florida "to paint and find new direction," and sent Irma to spend time with family in Mississippi.
The shift from Abstract Expressionism to Pop and Op art, Hale later wrote, left him feeling lost creatively. He still sold many pieces, mainly to New York collectors, but didn't keep records of his work. Hale's one social commentary painting, Levee, was in reaction to events in Mississippi of the murder of three civil rights workers. His unfinished Portrait of Tony Mitchell from 1963 featured the Canadian actor in a pastel-toned background. Also that year, Memphis critic Guy Northrop praised Hale's adventurous style, noting the vivid imagery and spontaneity in works like Castaway and Autumn Song. In 1964, Hale took a year off from teaching to focus on his art, painting portraits of local figures like Frank Hale, Paul Allison, and William Kester. He also designed a sports car with commercial artist Johnny Johnson, selling fiberglass bodies for buyers to complete themselves. They called it The Ruel.
In his role from the college, Hale encouraged his advanced students to take extra classes and do more outside work, which led to doubled class sizes and repeat students. Many students returned to say the best art education they received was at PBJC. Former students praised his teaching, recalling his impressive demonstrations, such as drawing anatomically correct skeletons from memory and using scumbling and glazing techniques. As demand grew, Hale added advanced courses like Drawing III and IV, Printmaking, and Sculpture, turning the program into a near-art school. His dedication kept students working late, and he believed his students could compete globally. During this time, Hale sold many artworks, including pastels and portraits.
By 1968 under pressure from college leadership, Hale accepted the role of art department chair. His father, Reuben Aldridge Hale, Sr. — a dedicated civic leader in Greenwood with a particular focus on youth development who no doubt had a significant positive impact on his son — had died the year before. Over time, Hale built one of Florida's best-equipped art departments, with an outdoor sculpture studio, kiln, foundry, and new presses. Eventually, he chaired both art and music, then the entire humanities division, expanding the Associate program into a four-year Bachelor of Arts degree program, the largest and most financially successful on campus. Hale received several professional accolades, including being listed in Who's Who in American Art, named an Outstanding Educator of America in 1973, and earning the title of Instructor of Distinction in 1974.
During this period, Hale created several notable works, including an abstract expressionist oil painting of a red woman (Untitled, 1972), a dye transfer photograph of his daughter Irma (1972), a small wood sculpture, Standing Figure (c. 1973), and a dark gold sculpture made from bamboo roots, Abstract Wood (1975). By 1976, he and Marie had grown apart and divorced. In 1980, Hale took a sabbatical to study holography with Sam Moree in New York, producing holographic art like Jack #4. Over a decade later Hale made a series of multimedia busts of female centurions, several of which contain a hologram.
He also began a series of large eagle drawings that spanned four decades. One of these works, Portrait-Bald Eagle (1980), might be interpreted as a self-portrait; his daughter, Irma, sees her father's eyes unmistakably looking out from the eagle's face. He also began creating a series of small mythological creatures from his home studio, including cherubs, fairies, devils, unicorns, and griffins, with the intention that they would adorn gates to his property.
In 1983, Hale launched the Palm Beach Master Photography Workshops with Tom McCartney and Gene Arant, attracting international photographers and bringing revenue to the college. President Ed Eissey had given him the directive to make the campus the cultural center of the county, so in 1986, Hale also designed and directed the renovations for the Duncan Theatre, then hired a director to bring in several professional theater groups, so that within two years, the theater was operating at a profit with a surplus for the college. That same year, Hale established and directed the Contemporary Art Museum for the college based in downtown Lake Worth. It housed a post-modern collection worth $3–5 million, mostly donated by J. Patrick Lannan, making the college "the owner of the second-largest crafts and kinetic art collection in the United States," according to published reports. Hale also helped to establish the Palm Beach Invitational International Piano Competition that year, arranging for a professional chamber orchestra to be in residence at the college, with Thomas Tsaggaris conducting.
By 1991, the large-scale airport commission Progression was a project requiring more of his time and energy, so Hale retired from academia but remained for a time as Executive Director of the Duncan Theatre and the Lannan Art Museum as well as on the boards of several local theater, arts, and cultural groups.
He had found love again with Valerie Burns whom he met at a party in 1990, and they had connected instantly; but she passed away in February 1995 after a brief illness. His mother, Sallie Irma Harris had died only one month earlier, and he was heartbroken. "The rest of 1995, I was pretty much lost and alone and all I could do was work in the studio," he wrote.
His sculpture work then included Negative Silhouettes (1995), Figure (1997), and Caryatids (1998) featuring five large-scale figures. Around this period, he was commissioned to design and build a 6-foot wall around a neighboring Art Deco compound at 2611 S. Flagler Drive. The owners wanted it to complement the design of the house, one of the best examples of Art Deco designs in the area. Hale built a relief sculpture for both sides of their entrance gate, then made molds in order to cast them again for each entrance. He also designed their gates and two walk-through gates; and later an additional relief sculpture for the wall facing the patio in the same mode.
He further went on to make Red Lady (2001), Blue Head (2004), Seated Figure (2006), Standing Woman (2010), and the nonchalantly smiling Yard Man (2012) who doubles as a catch-all for garden equipment. All are life-sized, and most have a boldness with penetrating eyes.
Reuben Hale died at age 91 in 2018. "Reuben was a driving force who never stopped working and thinking of new artworks," his daughter Irma said. "He accomplished so much and always remained a lovely and soft-spoken southern gentleman." She has taken up the mantle of representing his artwork, restoring his West Palm Beach home, and sharing his legacy with the world.