Marta Thoma Hall

Marta Thoma Hall uses her Fine Arts degree from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University not only for her artwork, but in her business as well. She is the President of Velodyne Lidar, a company that produces the Lidar technology needed for autonomous driving, and is a nationally-recognized artist. She has produced multiple paintings and prints for San Francisco galleries, displayed originals at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and participated in the Artist-In-Residency in the South San Francisco Waste and Recycle Center. Hall’s most famous piece of work there is “Earth Tear,” which is a public sculpture made of 250 recycled bottles and steel located in the Recology Sculpture Garden. Her other artwork at the Residency were shipped to the J. Claramunt Gallery in New York for a solo exhibition. Hall focuses on the theme of civic water resources and the environment. She has created numerous public art sculptures made of recycled glass bottles and steel for City Acquisitions and Commissions, which include “Journey of a Bottle” in Walnut Creek, “Water Source” and “Green River” in Goodyear, Arizona, “Double Wave” in San Francisco, “Earth Tear 2” in the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Cosmos” in the University of Florida, and “Journey of Water” in Seattle, Washington.

Hall was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1951. After studying Fine Arts, she worked as an illustrator producing paintings in the 1970’s. In the 1980’s, she began to add cut metal and wood shapes to her art to combine painting with sculpture. She met David Hall in 2007 and the two began collaborating on creating both public art as well as managing Velodyne Acoustics, now Velodyne Lidar. Hall is expected to have an exhibition of new sculptures inspired by the need to care for the environment and the concept of autonomous technology in 2017.