Marta Thoma Hall was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1951. She studied Fine Arts in California at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State and produced paintings and prints for San Francisco galleries. During the 1970’s, Hall worked as an illustrator until 1975 when she was given the opportunity to display her original paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. After this experience, Hall started to add cut metal and wood shapes into her art to combine painting with sculpture. She was then invited to participate in the Artist-In-Residency in the South San Francisco Waste and Recycle Center. Today NorCal Recology, part of the Residency, owns several paintings and sculptures by Hall in its collection. Her most famous piece there is “Earth Tear,” a public sculpture made of 250 recycled bottles and steel. Some of the other artwork Hall created at the Residency were shipped to the J. Claramunt Gallery in New York for solo exhibition in 1995. During the 1990’s and early 2000’s, she created numerous public art sculptures for City Acquisitions and Commissions on the theme of civic water resources and the environment. “Journey of a Bottle,” for the City of Walnut Creek, “Water Source” and “Green River,” for the City of Goodyear in Arizona, “Double Wave,” for San Francisco, “Earth Tear 2,” for the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Cosmos,” for the University of Florida, and “Journey of Water,” for the City of Seattle, are some examples of her sculptures made of steel and recycled glass bottles.
In 2007, Hall met David Hall who became the Inventor and Founder of Velodyne Acoustics. After collaborating on creating public art and managing the company, Hall became the Head of Marketing until her promotion to President. In 2015, the firm became Velodyne Lidar and raised $150 million from Ford Motors and Baidu. Lidar is the technology used in autonomous driving and because the demand for self-driving cars has increased, Velodyne Lidar has growth drastically as well. Even with her busy schedule as President, Hall plans on having an exhibition in 2017 of new sculptures inspired by the need to care for the environment and the concept of autonomous technology.
