Habitat Illustrator Marcellus Hall Wins Prestigious Honor

And now we bring you a ray of sunshine that has absolutely nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic.

A watercolor by the illustrator Marcellus Hall, a frequent contributor to Habitat and other publications, will appear in the prestigious American Illustration 39 award book later this year. The watercolor, which appeared in the April 2019 issue of Habitat, shows a man in a suit made of dollar bills as he is fussed over by a team of tailors. The article, which guided co-op boards through the process of refinancing their underlying mortgage, appeared under the headline: “Tailoring a Refi to Suit Your Needs.”

The illustration was one of 415 winners chosen from 7,000 submissions by a jury of distinguished art directors and designers from the New York Times, HarperCollins Publishers, Mother Jones and other publications.

Hall’s work has also appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and on the cover of The New Yorker, which he calls “the Holy Grail” for illustrators.

In October 2018, in fact, Hall watercolors appeared simultaneously on the covers of The New Yorker and Habitat. The former was a whimsical portrait of street life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; the latter showed three people running on treadmills made of dollar bills, a way of illustrating an article about the need for co-op boards to gauge the fiscal fitness of potential apartment buyers. 

Hall, a native of Minneapolis and a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, has also published a graphic novel, Kaleidoscope City, illustrated children’s books, postcards, and book covers, and produced a series on New York City street fashion. For good measure, he writes songs and plays acoustic guitar with a trio called Marcellus Hall and the Hostages.