skip to Main Content
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Artist, Houston, Texas

Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts - Class of Spring 2017


Trenton Doyle Hancock was born in Oklahoma City and raised in Paris, Texas. He earned his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and BFA from Texas A&M University at Commerce. Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, one of the youngest artists ever to participate in this prestigious survey. His work has been translated to the stage in Cult of Color: Call to Color, a ballet commissioned by Ballet Austin and created together with Stephen Mills and Graham Reynolds. He also created a mural for the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium in Dallas as well as the site-specific installation A Better Promise, at the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park.

 

Hancock’s intricate candy-colored prints, drawings, collaged-felt paintings, and site-specific installations work together to tell the story of the “Mounds”—bizarre mythical creatures that are the tragic protagonists of his unfolding narrative between good and evil. Influenced by both the history of painting and pop-culture pulp-imagery, Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions—such as the use of color, language, and pattern—into opportunities to build narrative and convey symbolic meaning. Text embedded within the paintings and drawings drives the narrative and acts as a central visual component. His resulting installations often sprawl beyond canvas edges and onto surrounding gallery walls.

 

Hancock’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami; Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; Savannah College of Art and Design; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and others. His work is in permanent collections at home and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; Contemporary Museum in Honolulu; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; New Orleans Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Warhol Museum; Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University; and Whitney Museum of American Art. He is represented in New York by James Cohan Gallery.

Back To Top