Artist-in-Residence

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Good Vegan Progression #5, 2007. Hand-cut synthetic, natural, and digitally printed fabric layered and stitched on fire retardant theater curtain. 216 x 648 inches. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

Trenton Doyle Hancock works in a variety of media—including painting, drawing, print, assemblage, sculpture, and literature—to tell a self-generated artistic mythology with characters drawn from serialized superhero stories and biblical allegory. Hancock’s imaginative creatures embody themes of life and death, the struggle between good and evil, love, authority, spirituality, and moral relativism.

In 2008, Hancock translated this ongoing narrative into Cult Of Color: Call To Color, a dance production the artist developed in conjunction with Ballet Austin. FWM collaborated with Hancock to fabricate scenic elements for this show, including one of the main backdrops of an abstracted forest scene. Its appliquéd and hand-sewn surface showcased a vibrant color palette and expressionistic visual energy.

In addition to hybridizing imagery, Hancock is equally adept at wordplay. During his six-year obsession (2006–12) with Spell-Down, an online Yahoo! game, he maintained a journal with detailed game notes, reordering consonants and vowels to construct new words and meanings. Fifty pages of these notes provided the material for an eponymous wallpaper, SPELLDOWN, Hancock created with FWM. This work debuted in Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing, the 2014 mid-career retrospective organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Artist Bio

American, born 1974, Oklahoma City, OK. Lives and works in Houston, TX.  

Trenton Doyle Hancock combines the mundane with the mythological. He draws inspiration from comics, biblical stories, modern and classical art, and even digital word games to create paintings that fuse his personal story with social critique. Hancock completed his BFA at Texas A&M University and his MFA at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Hancock was chosen for the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and again in 2002, making him one of the youngest artists to participate in the exhibition. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. TX; Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, PA; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. In 2014, a retrospective exhibition of his work organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, TX traveled to the Akron Art Museum, OH; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA. His work resides in acclaimed collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; il Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others. He is represented by the James Cohan Gallery.