SCAD deFINE ART artist talk: Trenton Doyle Hancock

Name: SCAD deFINE ART artist talk: Trenton Doyle Hancock
Start: 2026-02-25T14:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-02-25T15:00:00-05:00
Location: 601 Turner Blvd, Savannah, GA, United States, Georgia 31401

Schedule

Wed Feb 25 2026 at 02:00 pm to 03:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

601 Turner Blvd, Savannah, GA, United States, Georgia 31401 | Savannah, GA

Join Trenton Doyle Hancock for an artist talk as he speaks on his paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works featured in the group exhibition "In Character." Learn about the personal histories and formal strategies behind his expansive narratives, which blend traditional visual art practices with animation and sequential art styles. Hancock will trace the origins of his ever-evolving Moundverse, populated by figures such as Torpedo Boy and the Vegans, as a framework through which lived experience and broader cultural realities converge, while also reflecting on his career trajectory.
This event is free and open to the public and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2026.
About the artist
For more than two decades, Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974, Oklahoma City, Okla.) has been constructing his own fantastical narrative that continues to develop and inform his prolific artistic output. Part fictional, part autobiographical, Hancock’s work pulls from personal experience, the art historical canon, comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop culture references, resulting in a complex amalgamation of characters and plots possessing universal concepts of light and dark, good and evil, and all the gray in between.
Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions — such as his use of color, language, and pattern — into opportunities to create new characters, develop subplots, and convey symbolic meaning. Hancock’s works are suffused with personal mythology presented at an operatic scale, often reinterpreting Biblical stories the artist learned as a child from his family and local church community. His exuberant and subversive narratives employ a variety of cultural tropes, ranging in tone from comic-strip superhero battles to medieval morality plays, influenced in style by Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, Henry Darger, Philip Guston, and R. Crumb. Text embedded within the paintings and drawings both drives the narrative and acts as a central visual component. The resulting sprawling installations spill beyond the canvas edges and onto the gallery walls.
As a whole, Hancock’s highly developed cast of characters acts out a complex mythological battle, creating an elaborate cosmology that embodies his unique aesthetic ideals; musings on color, language, and emotions; and, ultimately, good versus evil. Hancock’s mythology has also been translated through performance — including the original ballet Cult of Color: Call to Color, commissioned by Ballet Austin — and through site-specific murals for the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium in Texas and the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park.
Hancock was raised in Paris, Texas, and earned his B.F.A. from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, Philadelphia. In November 2024, Hancock was featured in the Jewish Museum exhibition Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston. The exhibition is on view at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles through March 2026. In November 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston unveiled Color Flash for Chat and Chew, Paris Texas in Seventy-Two, Hancock’s monumental tapestry commission, which remains on permanent display in the museum’s Kinder Building. In 2019, a major exhibition of his work, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, opened at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams. In 2014, his retrospective Skin and Bones: 20 Years of Drawing at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston traveled to the Akron Art Museum, Ohio; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach.
Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennials, becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in the prestigious survey. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Locust Projects, Miami; Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Mo.; Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Fla.; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, N.C.; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Fla.; Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Olympic Sculpture Park at the Seattle Art Museum; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Hancock’s work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Akron Art Museum; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tenn.; Menil Collection, Houston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Morgan Library & Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; Syracuse University Art Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.