Trenton Doyle Hancock’s usage of a motif from his childhood appears as an unsuspecting grid overlay on his mixed media works. The repeating tile pattern was original from his grandmother’s home in Paris, Texas. Learning to draw on the floor as a child as his grandmother went about her day, Hancock rekindled his encounter with the pattern while visiting a home in upstate New York. The story of this tiled flooring reminds Hancock and viewers that the subconscious underpins an artist’s work.
Working in fantastical characters that translate into paintings, drawings, and even theatre productions, the artist’s work now faces the self. Reflecting on Hancock’s background as a cartoonist for his alma mater’s newspaper at Texas A&M University-Commerce, he created a rich narrative surrounding a two-party battle that defined the origins of his career. The Mounds and the Vegans speak to half-human, half-plant creatures that battle each other in an age-old fight of good and evil. Moving past this codified creation story in recent years, Doyle acknowledges the autobiographical aspect of his work. He states, “Okay, deal with real stuff and just see where that goes. So I’m figuring out new filters in ways to figure out what’s important, what do I follow up on, but I know most of it is going to start with the self.”
Now toiling with subversive narratives that challenge ideas tied to white supremacy, American football as a collective identity, and the personal as political, the dichotomy of using both a vivid, layered color palette and a monochromatic tone is also prevalent in Hancock’s practice. Through the celebration of life and the somberness of reality, the artist reckons with how seemingly oppositional emotional atmospheres can occur simultaneously in one’s life.
This film is part of Burnaway’s partnership with Art21, an organization that produces award-winning documentary films about the world’s most groundbreaking contemporary artists. The collaboration intends to deepen an understanding of visual art that hails from the South and the Caribbean today.
Burnaway is pleased to announce a sponsored talk with Georgia State University for their next and last Welch Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture for the semester with Trenton Doyle Hancock on Monday, March 10th at 5:30pm EST. The talk will take place at the Florence Kopleff Recital Hall, GSU Downtown Campus. Street parking is recommended.
All of VAS talks are free and open to the public. For more information on the event, please click here.
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The exhibition’s title is inspired by the medieval practice of alchemy, popularized during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Western Europe—the origins of which trace back to ancient Egypt and Greece. The title uncovers how Black artists transform everyday objects and critiques of race, capitalism, and white supremacy into extraordinary works of art. This transmutation is predicated on the ways in which Black people in America have persevered despite a complex history of enslavement, segregation, discrimination, and extreme violence, much of which persists today.
Flesh and Bone by John Guzman at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston
The artist generally picks up where Philip Guston left off. The latter’s mid-seventies paintings often look like minced meat abandoned in the kitchen sink, and some of them are interior scenes with distended body parts (for example, Feet on Rug from 1978 or 1976’s Monument). Guzman comes very close to those paintings in The Wake (2023), a mass of muscle arranged in a wave formation. But instead of Guston’s muted melancholy, Guzman opts for acute angles and forceful diagonals to make every object either move or at least spit out liquids—blood, sweat, and, in the case of Heartburn (2021), thick gray smoke. He’s also more of a graphic artist than Guston, accentuating shapes with black lines and adding inventive details that sometimes serve as a distraction from the intended effect.
