What Trenton Doyle Hancock Learned From Philip Guston

The Jewish Museum pairs the Texas artist with a 20th-century master. Together they confront racism with horror — and humor.

When Trenton Doyle Hancock discovered the artist Philip Guston, it was a revelation. Hancock had just transferred from junior college in his hometown, Paris, Texas, to nearby East Texas State University. He was taking a printmaking class and working with a haunting photograph he’d made of himself partially cloaked in a white sheet with a noose around his neck. The rope wound around his body, including his semi-bare right arm, which holds up a hammer. Titled “The Properties of the Hammer” (1993), it probed the dark contradictions of being a Black man in America.

Hancock’s printmaking teacher, Thomas Seawell, asked if he knew about Philip Guston, the New York School artist. Guston had (very controversially) left behind Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s to make figurative, cartoonish paintings of objects like books and shoes, which hearkened back to the Holocaust, as well as hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. Seawell saw a kinship between Guston’s work and Hancock’s, but Hancock had never heard of Guston. So Seawell lent him a book, and the student fell in love.

“The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible,” Hancock, 50, recalled recently. “When you put a colorful toy in front of a child, they want to eat it. That’s how I felt about those paintings: I just wanted to eat them. I didn’t even know you could make work that looked like this. It was totally new to me.”

If you’ve never had the urge to eat a painting, you’re not alone, but meeting Hancock or seeing his art helps make that impulse understandable. He is a voracious consumer of culture, and his work has an intense physicality — in the bodies that are forever bending, stretching and breaking in his images, and in the cutout and collaged surfaces of his paintings. Hancock’s world is a profusion of colors, of media, of characters in his ever-expanding multiverse.

His studio in a Houston suburb bears this out. Rooms of the two-story house are devoted to various collections, including sketchbooks dating back to childhood, scraps and detritus (literally dirt swept off the floor of past studios), and plastic bottle caps sorted by color.

One small room contains an installation of dozens of toy vehicles; parked facing the door, they appear as a plastic and vaguely menacing battalion. “I call it the Houston traffic jam,” Hancock joked.

The room represents a fraction of his toy collection, which fills his nearby house. Grouped thematically, they overflow the living room; King Kong, two owls, and a naked Barbie fill a dramatically lit hallway niche. The pinnacle is what he’s dubbed “the toy museum” in a basketball court on the second floor (built by the home’s previous owners): thousands of objects displayed in a delicate suspension between order and chaos. He showed it all off like a proud parent.

In contrast to his environment, the bespectacled, white-bearded Hancock is mellow, happy to sit and talk for hours. He may be a bit compulsive — he recently determined he’s probably on the autism spectrum — but his curiosity fuels his polymathy. He references 1980s sci-fi movies as readily as abstractions by Stanley Whitney, his former teacher and mentor, and the alternative comics magazine Raw. Hancock has invented his own multiverse (named “The Moundverse”), designed Halloween costumes and is working on a graphic novel, while simultaneously sustaining a successful, mainstream art career. His interests and influences commingle in his work; he chews on ideas and images while digesting his own life experiences.

So he has done with Guston, particularly the older artist’s Klan images, which were made more than half a century ago and remain contentious: In 2020, four museums jointly decided to postpone a major Guston retrospective in order to better contextualize them. That traveling exhibition opened in 2022 in Boston before stopping in Houston, Washington and London.

Starting on Nov. 8, viewers in New York will get to see some of Guston’s Klan paintings — most of which have not been shown here in decades — at the Jewish Museum, where they will hang alongside works by Hancock. “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston” pairs the two artists in an unusual exhibition that’s as much about the possibilities of a comics-inflected style of painting (Guston himself drew cartoons as a teenager) as it is about the horrors of white supremacy.

“There have been requests to exhibit my father’s work with other painters, but none has felt right, because they’ve recognized a reality but not a vision,” said Musa Mayer, Guston’s daughter, who approved the museum’s pairing. By contrast, Hancock’s art “came from deep within. I could see in Trenton some of the same obsessive inner reflection that I see in my father’s work.”

The genesis of the show dates to 2017, when Confederate monuments were being removed as white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, Va., for the Unite the Right rally. “It was this clear moment where you could see the way that white supremacy was fueling both anti-Black racism and antisemitism,” Rebecca Shaykin, the exhibition’s curator, recalled. At the Jewish Museum, Shaykin and her colleagues wanted to respond by bringing in Guston. Shaykin saw Hancock as a perfect partner.

Between a white, Jewish artist who came out of the Ab Ex movement in the mid-20th century and a young Black contemporary artist in Texas, she found symmetry — in “their life stories, the way they make art, how they approach the world, how they feel about their role as artists in society, and how their art can challenge people,” Shaykin said.

“Draw Them In, Paint Them Out” will open in tandem with a show of new, related works by Hancock at his gallery, James Cohan. The paintings feature Hancock’s alter ego, a sort of buffoonish superhero named Torpedoboy, facing off with Guston’s Klansmen. Hancock first imagined and drew this meeting in 2014, in a series titled “Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw!” that unfolds like a joke: Torpedoboy goes over to the Klansmen’s house to screw in a lightbulb. The artist has continued to revisit it in the decade since, but recently the encounters — which were always fraught — have grown more violent.

This turn, Hancock said, came from studying Guston’s Klan pictures in the recent retrospective. Although “I couldn’t love any paintings any more,” Hancock said, he became increasingly aware of what they were missing. Guston projected himself under the hood to explore his own complicity. In Guston’s universe, the “Klansmen got away with it. They rode their jalopies off into the sunset, smoking their cigars. There was never a come-to-justice kind of moment.”

By contrast, Hancock was looking for revenge. “The part of me that loves action films, horror films, gore and special effects wants to see that folded into this narrative,” he said.

So, in new paintings like “In the Lap of Victory” (2024), a towering Torpedoboy in a football uniform — his battle armor — stomps on a bloodied Klansman. In “At Stake” (2024), however, a Klansman seems poised to drive a cross through the heart of a shriveled Torpedoboy. There is, in other words, no winner, nor the resolution you’d get from a classic action movie.

“I think it’s a forever battle,” Hancock said. “My theory is that racism wants to live. It’s like a cancer — it morphs and finds a way to symbiotically stay alive.”

Although Hancock’s Klan paintings may be his most overtly political work yet, what they broadcast about navigating life in the United States as a Black man has always been at the heart of his practice. His references to the church or white supremacy have long been “hidden in the work, and they’re beautiful gems,” observed the artist William Villalongo, a friend since their days at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. “I think sometimes Black people don’t even see that that is where the work is grounded,” he added.

HANCOCK LEARNED TO DRAW at an early age, but he also grew up playing football and going to church. His stepfather was a Baptist minister, and his family was devout. When Hancock was about 10, amid the nationwide satanic panic, his mother and grandmother fell under the sway of TV evangelists who warned of demons entering people’s homes. Hancock’s mother decided to burn many of his and his brother’s toys, and she made them watch. The episode was traumatizing.

It was around that time that Hancock invented Torpedoboy, his own traditional superhero, as a means of finding escape and freedom. Decades later, he resurrected the character as a more schlubby and ironic, white-briefs-wearing alter ego. He’d been reading Joseph Campbell and “that’s when the world really opened up to me,” he said. “It was finding the courage, which was very painful, to leave the comfort of the church, into this new realm of discovery, creation and critical thinking.”

Although the artist has since introduced a Trenton Doyle Hancock character into his work, he still identifies with Torpedoboy: On the day of our visit, I arrived to find him wearing a yellow T-shirt with the hero’s pink-and-black logo on it.

It wasn’t long before Hancock created his own mythology, beginning with an origin story about an ancient ape man who masturbated into a field of magical flowers, thus creating the first Mounds. Torpedoboy guards them against attacks by the Vegans, a band of tofu-eating extremists (inspired by Hancock’s then-girlfriend’s real vegan friends). For Hancock, these characters are both metaphors and fully realized fictions.

The curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, who has long championed Hancock’s work, recalled that in their first conversation, “He was speaking this mythology with such conviction, and I kept thinking, OK, he’s going to break character. But he never broke character. I was like, This is real for him.”

Cassel Oliver helped give Hancock one of his first breaks at age 25: a spot in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, where he showed nearly a dozen drawings and collages. That same year, he received his M.F.A. from Tyler and began working with James Cohan gallery. Roberta Smith, reviewing his first solo show there for The New York Times, described his “operatic semi-autobiographical drawing-collages” as “extraordinarily promising.”

As time went on, Hancock added more stories to his vision, and toys to his collection, perhaps as a form of self-healing. (He made a point of reacquiring the things his mother had burned.) He met his future wife, the artist JooYoung Choi, who had also invented her own mythological world. His early career success never waned, but in 2012, he sent an email to his dealers expressing his need to branch out beyond painting — to animation, toy design, comic books, film. “If I don’t do it, I’m going to go crazy,” he recalled writing.

The culmination of those efforts, in 2019, was “Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass,” a life-size game board of an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The show included sculptural mounds you could enter and blown-up pages from his graphic novel-in-progress, all connected by a colorful, winding path. It inspired childlike wonder without ignoring the weird and dark edges of reality.

The Jewish Museum show will be heavier and more focused, while still summoning the sense of play essential to Hancock’s work. The design will evoke a carnival, with the show organized around booths. This was inspired partly by the annual Paris, Texas, fair — a place of joy for Hancock as a kid but one that he later discovered had also been the site of horrific racist violence, most notably the 1893 lynching of the Black teenager Henry Smith. Hancock and Shaykin visited the fair last month to shoot a video that will play in the museum.

The ability to approach the country’s brutal history with grotesque humor is something he learned in part from Guston, whose late paintings can be as whimsical as they are provocative. Hancock’s art amplifies that tension: His work is fervent, maybe even outlandish, but its sources and ideas are deeply familiar. As he told me, “As off to my own as I may be in the art world, I believe that all the components are well understood and rooted in something that might be very American.”