Trenton Doyle Hancock: When my mom went through this intense reattachment to her faith in the mid-80s, she burned all the D&D stuff in the fireplace. She burned all of our action figures in the barrel behind the house and burned all my Garbage Pail Kids, which were basically the Mad Magazine type stuff, on the sidewalks. She just put them in the barrel, poured gasoline and then lit a match. You’d like to think you’d get over those kinds of things. It was just so long ago, and it wasn’t like anyone was hurt. But on an emotional level, to someone like me with my condition, I was like, “Oh, this is my stuff. That was my life.” Part of that is collecting. It’s like having an object to it and then infusing into that objecthood a kind of person, right? It was like, I got to protect these things. I have to take this stuff in and care and hold it. “It may end up in a fire somewhere.”

Guston’s work is actually a lot about blackness. It’s about blackness and whiteness and the construction of race and all those things. And I think I just was pulling some things out of the air, and being mean to myself in a way. But it’s like, there’s something to this phraseology here.

Hrag Vartanian: Welcome back to the Hyperallergic Podcast. This episode, we’re talking to artist Trenton Doyle Hancock, who is the subject of a major exhibition at the Jewish Museum here in New York titled Draw Them In, Paint Them Out. His work confronts the seminal work of Philip Guston. On the surface, these two artists might seem like an unlikely pair. Guston was an Ashkenazi Jew whose parents came from Ukraine, while Doyle Hancock, a black American Southerner, grew up in a very conservative Christian family. But once you walk in, you get it. Both of them confront the history of American white supremacy with very graphic, stark imagery. Guston, for his part, is well known today as someone who rejected the abstraction that he had made a career on in the 1960s, and then started painting representational images that included hoods that looked like those worn by the KKK. Doyle Hancock, for his role, confronts that history in Guston’s paintings while adding his own cast of characters. And all of this will be part of our conversation this episode.

For this episode, I also ask longtime Hyperallergic contributor, as well as renowned poet and art critic, John Yau, to join us. John Yau has been writing about Guston for decades, but I just sensed there was something in the way John writes his poetry and the way Trenton creates art that felt similar in some ways — a certain poetry that I saw in their work. And I think you’ll see in this conversation that…I might have been right.

Much has been said about Guston’s fascinating life story. But this episode, we’re going to focus on Trenton Doyle Hancock and Philip Guston’s poetic imagery, as well as their materials and their use of formal aesthetics. I think you’ll see that there’s really a lot to discuss. My name is Hrag Vartanian. I’m the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic. I’m excited to get started. So, let’s go.

Hrag Vartanian: Okay, and now we’re off. Well, thank you, gentlemen, for being here. This is such a great honor to have a conversation about your work, Trenton, and of course, John, who’s written about your work quite a bit. I thought this would be such a great opportunity to talk about your recent show at the Jewish Museum, your relationship with Philip Guston artistically, and for people to learn about your work in general. So thank you for being here.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: It’s an honor to be here, speaking with both of you at Hyperallegic. As I was saying to you earlier, it’s like Hyperallergic has been sort of omnipresent. I don’t remember a time when it didn’t exist.

John Yau: Well, that’s nice.

Hrag Vartanian: That is nice! So Trenton, I want to start talking a little bit about your life, because I think it definitely informs your work, and particularly with the current show at the Jewish Museum, Paris, Texas plays a big role, especially in the artwork that you have up there at the Paris, Texas Fairgrounds from last year. So do you want to give us a little sense about your life? You were born in Oklahoma, I believe?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. I was born in Oklahoma City and quickly thereafter, my mom moved back to Paris, Texas where she was raised. And so it’s sort of the only hometown I know. It’s a town of about 30,000 people, and pretty mixed in terms of black and white. Back in the 70s and 80s, I was kind of oblivious to a lot of things. I had a middle class upbringing, and people seemed to get along. Some of the strife from the previous decade had been maybe ameliorated a little bit by some southern pleasantries and things like that, but they were obviously still there. It was only in getting older and moving away from Paris and having a perspective on what was lurking under the surface.

Hrag Vartanian: I want to note that there’s a video piece in the exhibition titled “Paris, Texas Fairgrounds” (2024). It’s placed in a large cylinder in the center of the gallery floor. As you walk in, you see images of a fairground as well as images of a lynching taking place. It’s a very eerie work, and I wanted to read a little bit of the wall label for you.

“The fairgrounds of Paris, Texas were a place of wonder and joy for Hancock in his youth. Only in the last 10 years did the true nature of the site come into focus for him. He had known that in 1893, the Black 17-year-old Henry Smith had been executed in Paris by Klansmen. They paraded Smith through town, tortured him and burned him alive before a crowd of 10,000 onlookers, who then scavenged his remains from mementos. What Hancock didn’t know was that the horrific lynchings, so brutal that it made national headlines, had been staged on the site that subsequently became the fairgrounds.”

One of the things about that work that felt really poignant to me is when you walk in, your shadow gets cast on the screens around you. It feels like it implicates you as a viewer. And at the same time, it echoes some of the imagery in Hancock’s work that you see in the exhibition where figures are sometimes cut out and we only see silhouettes. It’s a very moving piece.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: So I was able to come back to looking through that lens at what a place like Paris is. You know, when it comes to the Confederacy after the Civil War, a lot of those defeated generals ended up in towns like Paris.

John Yau: Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: They had basically temples built for them and around them. And so a lot of the tourism for Paris is these historical markers, these buildings, that were homes for Confederate generals.

John Yau: Right. Prestigious confederate officers.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah, exactly. So these were places that when I was a kid, they had us going there. And it was just like, “Oh, we’re going to take a day off of school and we’re going to go and tour these houses.” And they didn’t see anything wrong with that, and neither did we. We were just like, “Oh, it’s a day we don’t have to be in class.” But I always knew there was something kind of creepy about it.

John Yau: When they brought you there, did they talk about slavery?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Oh, not at all.

John Yau: So, “It was a war between the states and it had nothing to do with slavery and economics.”

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Exactly. That wasn’t part of the script.

John Yau: Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: So yeah, those were things that shouldn’t be revisionist, but it was like…

John Yau: That’s the revisionism. And some parts of America want to go back to that now.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Exactly. So I think that pretty much positions us where I am with the Jewish Museum show.

Hrag Vartanian: And you grew up in the Methodist Church, was it?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: No, no, it was Baptist and Pentecostal.

Hrag Vartanian: Baptist. Got it.

John Yau: Oh, so that’s the hardcore, the hard-shared Baptist, as they say, I think.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah, no, they’re fire and brimstone.

John Yau: Right. So very literal about hell.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Quite literal. It wasn’t like, “Oh, this is this sort of poetic veil…” It wasn’t that. It was, “There’s a place that’s just made of fire and you go there if you’re bad.”

John Yau: Right. And did you go to church? Did your family go to church every Sunday?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday.

John Yau: Oh!

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah, my dad was the minister.

John Yau: Oh!

Trenton Doyle Hancock All of my aunts…

John Yau: That’s right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: …and my mom were in the choir. And they were missionaries, all of that.

Hrag Vartanian: Why Wednesday?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: That was Bible study.

Hrag Vartanian: I see.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah.

John Yau: There were two things that hit me when I was thinking about you and your work. One was that you kind of realized that you were raised in a fear-based religion and that you then studied Joseph Campbell and you realized that Christianity is part of many myths, not just dumb truth.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Right.

John Yau: And it causes quite a disturbance in you. You really freaked out. You go to talk to the teacher. The teacher’s really understanding about this. I thought, “Wow, what a wonderful person you met,” that says, “Well, you have to deal with this, but there’s one truth. It’s one truth among many truths.” And then at the same time, you’ve discovered comic books. And somehow you get to bring them together. So, what role does Guston play in this? Because he always loved comics, but then he comes back to it.

Hrag Vartanian: Great question.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Well, I like that you pinpointed that kind of nexus point for me. It was around 1994, or ‘95.

John Yau: So how old were you?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: I was 20, 21.

John Yau: Okay.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And so I had my awakening probably a little bit later than some people maybe.

John Yau: It doesn’t matter when it happens, as long as it does.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: It does. And it totally happened, and it was very destabilizing. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me, because it’s like, all that you know is true….now you’re questioning all that stuff, and questioning the people that told you those things as well. And so it’s like, “Oh, I’m growing up very fast. The gravity is different now.” Luckily, I was able to find a new peer group pretty immediately that was welcoming.

John Yau: Where was this peer group?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: This was in Commerce, Texas.

John Yau: Okay, right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: This is not far from Paris, Texas. It’s still a very small town. The biggest thing in the town was the college. And so I basically went to that school because that’s the school my mom went to. And she’s like, “Well, that’s where you’re going.”

John Yau: Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And I was pretty compliant about those things at the time. She didn’t quite understand that she was sending me to a quite revolutionary situation with thinkers that were so far outside the box that would’ve made her head spin.

Hrag Vartanian: I love that.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: But I was totally the beneficiary of this kind of amazing group of ace students and professors, and also just people that had graduated just stayed and populated the town that were just weirdos. And so that was really a great thing for me. And that helped in that moment where it’s like, well, “Christianity is just this story.” Are these Bibles like allegories?

John Yau: Allegories. Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: You know. It’s all just imagery that’s up for grabs.

John Yau: Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And as scary as it was, it was also very exciting, because shortly after, I’m reading James Baldwin and people like that.

John Yau: Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: That helped on the race side of things and the sexual orientation side of things and civil rights and all of that. And that’s where a friend of mine, my roommate, gave me some Raw magazines. So there’s the Art Spiegelman thing. And around that same time I learned about Guston. And I just saw him as another comic book artist, really. So it wasn’t about painting so much, it was just about, “Here’s a guy making this crazy imagery.” So I just lumped it all together really.

John Yau: That’s interesting too. People in New York were puzzled by what happened when he changed his work. I mean, the New York art world. I saw Guston when I was in Boston University, and I had no idea that there was this hierarchy. I walked in and saw these paintings and went, “Oh, this is really interesting.” They’re really beautifully painted. And I just kept going back. And then…

Hrag Vartanian: Where did you see them for the first time, John?

John Yau: Boston University.

Hrag Vartanian: So in the gallery there.

John Yau: Yeah. They had a show with his work in it. And I was walking around. I think there was a Max Ernst there and something else. And I just said, “Who’s this guy?” And then started finding out about him.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: At what point was he in his…

John Yau: That was around 1969, 1970 when he first…it’s the first Ku Klux Klan paintings.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: So those were what you saw?

John Yau: Yeah, those are the first things I saw. I had seen him, but I don’t think I thought of him in a certain way. In the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, all they had was color field painting. They did not want to look at anything else. There were practically no galleries in Boston in 1970. So I saw Motherwell and then Jules Olitski and then Guston. And it was like, “Oh, who’s this guy?”

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Right.

John Yau: But one of the things I thought about in your show with you and Guston is Guston never points his finger at anybody else. He’s got the hood on in that self-portrait where he is pointing at himself. And when he portrays himself in the hood, it’s always as an artist, right? He’s in a car, he’s driving around, you see the stretchers in the back. So he’s part of a club, and he’s saying, “I don’t want to be part of this club anymore. I have to leave this club.” And he only does the paintings for a few years, and then he takes the hood off, literally, and metaphorically. But in your work, you don’t really point the finger at anybody else either. That nerdy character is pretty interesting. He’s kind of always implicating himself.

Hrag Vartanian: Which character? Because that’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about.

John Yau: Torpedo Boy.

Hrag Vartanian: Torpedo Boy, got it.

John Yau: I think he’s one of the great inventions. Because he’s nerdy, and you identify with him, but you also see how different he is. And then you see his perplexedness. He’s perplexed, but he also has a sense of humor and sees through what’s going on around him, maybe not right away, but eventually. And there’s that kind of clarity where he sees things and then he suddenly puts it in perspective. It’s pretty wonderful, because I think the viewer gets like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been in that position. Somebody’s doing a number on me.”

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Right. Well, thank you. He’s been this character that I’ve worked with in so many different ways for 40 years now. And this most recent iteration of him does exactly what you’re saying. That’s by design. But then there’s this other component to that work — and it doesn’t show up in every painting, but I’d say 75% of the ones from the past five years are this — it’s a different kind of pointing. And sometimes it’s in the kind of animated grids that are behind the characters, where you’ll see oftentimes that it’s Torpedo Boy’s face, and eventually it’s morphing into either a Klansman or there’s this more recent picture I did called “Money Monster Management and the Magnificent Mess.” It’s kind of an alliterative title, but it’s the Torpedo Boy character with this dollar sign in his mind is transforming into a money monster. It’s like a dragon.

John Yau: Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And it’s, you know, we sort of talk about this conundrum of capitalism and the relationship of capitalism to white supremacy and this kind of power structure, and the danger of, no matter what race you are, of falling into this space of pacification where it’s all about the money. And you overlook a lot of things, and before you know it, that hood is on. And so that is a total part of this most recent work.

John Yau: Well, that’s it. It’s also interesting because as an artist, when you become successful, that’s something you have to deal with. “What is it that I’m after when I’m getting this attention?”

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Exactly. Yeah. There is this, “Well, what am I doing?”

John Yau: Right. “What am I doing? Who am I speaking to?”

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Uh-huh.

Hrag Vartanian: And so what’s interesting to me is within these different characters, you have a character, The Artist. How is that different? How would you characterize The Artist within that larger kind of toolbox of characters you use?

John Yau: Oh, good question.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. Well, there’s something that I’ve sort of separated out. Obviously, all the characters are me, but with the artist, people are like, “Oh, that’s the guy, that’s him with the glasses on. I saw him at the opening,” and they’re like, “Oh, that’s him.” But it’s not. To me, it’s the me with the most edges kind of sanded off and down. It’s this character who is a marshmallow of a character, and he’s very kind of passive in a lot of ways.

John Yau: Oh, interesting.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: So I project a whole lot of the societal ills upon him, and he’s just sort of downtrodden. He’s like a Charlie Brown. He becomes a Charlie Brown character. And so The Artist character in my work really doesn’t have a whole lot of agency, but has more than he even thinks because he’s the holder of the giant pencil. He’s the author.

John Yau: That’s almost the opposite way people see the artist. The artist is the only figure with agency, and everyone else doesn’t have any agency, and you reverse it or upend it. You upend this romantic model and then something else happens, which I think is interesting.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. Well, for me, there’s a kind of absurdism, I think, to playing with that trope that, “Oh, it’s an artist with all the powers,” like “The pen is my sword,” and all of that business. And then to have this character that you’re like, “Well, there’s a contradiction here. I’m not seeing this knight in shining armor that’s come to save us.” But how the total picture kind of plays out, perhaps, with if you add in Torpedo Boy or some of the other characters, it’s the dynamic that creates that. It sharpens the sword.

John Yau: Right. Because also, Guston’s artist is…he’s a fallen man. He’s the guy holding the brushes, but lying in bed. He’s lying in bed with the paint beside him and the nightmares on the other side, and he’s like, “What am I doing? I’ll smoke another cigarette.”

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Well, I think a lot of that comes out of…just having the show at the Jewish Museum, and I’m obviously a Black man coming from a Christian side of things. So there’s this like a mashing up of culture, but I think a tie that binds is this idea of humor, self-deprecation, using that as a way to cope and to understand how to deal with the trauma, how to transform that into something that’s usable and how to protect your mental health. And so I think the idea of that deprecation is built into what I do as a comedian, as a kind of editorial cartoonist.

John Yau: Right. So it’s anti-heroic in a way.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah, totally.

John Yau: So, I talked to Hrag about this: he loved George Herriman and Herriman was Creole, and could pass. And that’s also interesting that that was one of the people he loved the most in terms of cartoons.

Hrag Vartanian: And for those who don’t know, Herriman was the cartoonist behind Krazy Kat.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Krazy Kat. And I don’t think anyone knew of Herriman’s background at the time, but it all makes sense when you kind of recodify, and look at…

John Yau: Right. These species. They can’t get along, and one’s in love with the other, but the other ignores them, right? It is so beautiful.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: It’s a wonderful kind of breakdown of an American condition.

John Yau: Right. And you talk about that a lot, the breakdown of things that you kind of break down into different parts to examine in your work. That’s one of the things you do.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Right. Yeah. There’s like a macro-micro thing, I think for Guston.

John Yau: Like today.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Over time, over the course of his whole graphic career was doing that breakdown constantly. But then there’s these very clear moments where you can kind of see it in slow motion. You see the abstraction happen over a number of years, and then it slowly kind of comes into focus. But this is years, right? But then it happens minute by minute as he’s making a picture.

John Yau: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. It’s really kind of a wonderful lens to look at.

John Yau: When you look at the paintings in the Jewish Museum, you see in some of them that there’s a painting that he did underneath, and he went, “Nope, that’s not it.” And he just goes right over it. And that’s great. I love looking at that.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: It’s so great, because it’s the things you don’t see in books. It’s like the experiential…being in front of the thing, you’re like, “Oh, this is made. This is lived through. There’s a history here.” And he was okay with that. And I think that’s a generous thing about what he gave us.

Hrag Vartanian: I want to ask both of you about his earlier work, his prefigurative work. Now, when you look at it, what do you think about it? Does it move you at all? John, I’ll start with you because you may have a little bit more experience with that.

John Yau: I’m still moved by the plus minus paintings, and the ones where he’s just standing and he refuses to step away, and he has those beautiful red brushstrokes. I think they’re just beautiful paintings.

Hrag Vartanian: Have they changed? Has the later work changed the way you see the earlier work? Is there an obfuscation or something that you see?

John Yau: No. I think he started off in the John Reed Club. He was really pretty hardcore, I think. But he also was friends with Jackson Pollock in high school. They both get thrown out. Pollock goes back to school and Guston doesn’t. And then it’s Pollock who convinces Guston to move to New York. And my feeling is that Guston saw Pollock and thought “I have to make abstract paintings.” And that wasn’t really…when you’re doing it then, it’s like you’re on your own. As Frank O’Hara says, “You go on your nerve alone.” But he was friends with poets. He’s well-read. And at a certain point, I think he was supposed to leave everything out, and then he gets annoyed with this and decides, “No, I’m putting everything back in.” So I think that’s basically how I see it.

Hrag Vartanian: And how about you, Trenton?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Well, you said prefigurative, you mean the abstract?

Hrag Vartanian: Yeah. The abstract paintings. Not the earlier.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah, I always say that they’re not really abstractions. There’s something to me that’s so much about the body about that phase. And there’s something quite violent about them, to me. If you notice, there’s this kind of standard that he uses, this architecture of…there’s a coagulant of marks in the middle. He’s always fighting toward the middle of this picture. And it almost feels like, you know, how when you have a lump of clay and you just take your hands and you start grabbing at it, and those finger marks are in this clay. And that’s how those paintings feel to me. Like he’s grabbing at a body and he’s squeezing and he’s pulling, and there’s like flesh that’s being kind of torn away. So there’s a violence to those, to me. And there’s this urgency to get at the middle of something.

John Yau: Right. Wow, that’s beautiful.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And that leads, of course, to the later works where things come into focus. It’s like that middle coagulant that almost becomes deep space. It’s like moving into a body then starts to form itself and become volumetric, and that’s where the forms start to come back in.

John Yau: Right, with the heads. Yeah.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: So the marks are all still there. That’s what he discovered through the process. But then…it’s about how to flip something that is negative to positive. And then he has the permission to get back into them.

John Yau: The art historian David Anfam thought that those paintings, the ones that have a lot of red in them, had to do with wounds.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah, yeah, totally.

John Yau: And the minute he said it, I was just like, a light went off in my head. I went, “Oh, of course.”

Trenton Doyle Hancock: That’s totally how I feel about it.

Hrag Vartanian: And so in the catalog for the Jewish Museum Show, there’s a great drawing from ’97 that includes the words, “Like Guston but blacker and worse.” Do you want to talk a little bit about that, what you meant at the time, or do you even remember? It’s been a while.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: No, actually, I do remember. I was at Skowhegan. It was 1997, and that was the summer of finding myself. It was the summer of firsts. It was the first time I’d been drunk, first time I smoked pot, first time I danced in public. It was all these things that I was told, “You can’t do this or you go straight to hell.” I thought I would just catch fire immediately.

John Yau: Oh, sure. No, I know it. I have a friend, a good friend who’s a Mormon, and he’s talked about the first time he “got drunk” was when he worked in a coffee shop and he had coffee beans wrapped in chocolate. And he didn’t know the coffee beans could do this to him. And he ate a whole jar.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Wow.

John Yau: It happens when it happens.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: So ’97 was a really important year. It was a very important year. And so, yeah, I’m just starting to try to think about myself as a person in the world, as opposed to a person in Paris, Texas. It’s like, “Oh, all of this is open to me.” And so I started just playing with titles and language, and that’s where the self-deprecation started to come in. It’s like, okay, I identify with Philip Guston, but — perhaps this is more profound than I thought then — the blackness, like…Guston’s work is actually a lot about blackness. It’s about blackness and whiteness and the construction of race and all those things. And I think I just was pulling some things out of the air and being mean to myself in a way. But it’s like, there’s something to this phraseology here, right?

John Yau: Right. As much as it’s self-deprecating, it’s also remarkably self-confident because you’re taking on Guston. Other people are very derivative of Guston. And yet when I see you work, I don’t think derivative. I think you’re having a conversation with them that’s not about style. It’s about something else.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Because we couldn’t be more different as painters. How we get to the image is so different.

John Yau: Right. But you never left how you made the image. Many people did. And that struck me really strongly in your work.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Well, yeah, I appreciate that. And the focus these days has been on Guston, but it’s like I had to fight through Basquiat. I had to fight through Motherwell and all of these figures that I kind of deemed the art gods, or whatever.

John Yau: Sure.

Hrag Vartanian: Motherwell surprised me a little. What was it about Motherwell that you grappled with?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Wow. Motherwell was one of the first…at the Dallas Museum of Art, they have a great collection, and that was the first museum I ever went to in high school. I was a senior before I saw a real painting. And so I’m standing in one of the rooms, there’s a Lee Bontecou. There’s a Motherwell. It’s the “Elegy to the Spanish Republic.”

John Yau: The Spanish Republic, right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And it’s got these giant egg forms kind of marching, almost wobbling across the picture. And it was so animated to me. You read it from across the room, and then the closer you get to it, you’re like, “Oh, that’s not just white. That’s these levels of gray.” And the black is not just black, it’s also levels of gray. And so there’s this…how to break down a picture that seems simple into something that is very sophisticated or complex. It’s like a game. And so I think I first learned about the game of painting through Motherwell.

John Yau: Oh, that’s interesting. Because it is pretty explicit in that game. That’s great. And also because there’s a political element to his work.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Right. It’s like how to get content in, but keep it at bay in a way.

John Yau: Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. It was really kind of amazing.

Hrag Vartanian: So tell me about that first visit to the Dallas Museum of Art, because I think we all have those sort of experiences that really kind of open our understanding of art. Tell me a little bit about that. Was it a school trip?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: It was a school trip. And aside from the Motherwell…it was a Frederic Church, I believe. I might be getting the name wrong, but it was an iceberg painting.

John Yau: Oh, yes. Frederic Church.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. So I came away, and of course, I didn’t have the words for this at the time, and I didn’t understand what painting could do because all I’d seen was comic books and a few kind of fantasy paintings that me and my friends did. I didn’t understand that you could get this kind of richness and specificity of locale and space and time in a picture. And I remember coming away feeling cold. I was standing in front of this thing and I was like, “I need to put a coat on to look at the painting.” It was this very visceral kind of experience that it wasn’t even like, “Oh, I got to go figure out how to do that.” It was just mind-boggling. It was like how dreams are mind-boggling, or God, or something like that. It was just beyond me. It still kind of is.

Hrag Vartanian: So were you overstimulated? Because that’s a really interesting response. What was that gesture for you? Were you seeking comfort?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: It wasn’t overstimulating. If anything, it was comforting because it told me that there were things that I didn’t understand, and there were things that I didn’t understand about something that I thought I really did, which was how to be a graphic artist, how to make a painting, how to do these things. But here’s this thing that’s telling me, “Oh no, there’s a veil. And when you go past that, magic happens.” I was like, well, I am forever the student. And I like that.

John Yau: Oh, yeah. I think that’s important to always be the student. The great artists are always studying. They’re always students. They never stop being students.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Right. Which means you never take a vacation. You are always at work.

Hrag Vartanian: I’d love to bring up some of the other characters you sort of created: Loid. How would you describe Loid to people who don’t know what Loid is?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: There’s some characters that are more outside of me, and then there’s some that I tap into something that I’m scared of about myself. This kind of the fire and brimstone thing about the Christian upbringing, which I thought I had emancipated myself from. But this kind of judgmental thing, I apparently have never really let go of, because when it comes out, it comes out. It’s like, “Oh, I put things in two categories. It’s like it’s us against them.” Also, growing up in the south, it’s like football. People think in terms of “your team.” So then there’s this character, Loid, who is kind of comes out of that. He’s in some ways the worst of all of that. But he’s also a good character. He’s still on the side of good, and he wants to write the universe and kind of balance things. But he does it in a very different way than another character called Painter who is more about color, and it’s about kind of falling into the beauty of color, I suppose. But yeah, for Loid, everything is black and white.

John Yau: Right. He can’t let go of anything. It seems to me that that’s who he is.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And he’s a character I definitely needed. And throughout it kind of ebbs and flows, I think, in my narrative and my life, quite frankly, when I need that kind of character to come back. I think he’s coming back now.

John Yau: Because of the situation?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Because of where we are.

John Yau: Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And it’s sort of a natural kind of…it’s not like this is an abrupt thing. It’s like, “Oh, I need him now.” It’s like he’s slowly been coming back to me to take the place of the Klansman, to take the place of reclaiming something.

John Yau: Right. Because the situation’s getting much more rigid as time passes.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. And it sharpens your voice a little bit. And I think he’s one that…It was all about his voice in the beginning. It’s like, “You deserve less,” or he’s kind of spouting this stuff of judgment at people. And that was at the beginning, 25 years ago, I was thinking about class and my place in it. And, I don’t know, the things I had been taught about upward mobility and Black excellence and all these types of things. So a character like Loid was there to…keep me held back a little bit. But also I was angry. I was angry at the art world for not letting me, and art people that like me.

John Yau: Yeah. That makes sense to me.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And so that was an anger.

Hrag Vartanian: And how about the Bringback?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Bringback is a character who’s sort of like the Mound. And the Mound is a character that’s sort of a…I say it’s the pin cushion of all the worries and angst of the earth. Everyone just sort of stabs their fork into this one sad character who doesn’t have any legs or arms and is planted in the ground, so he can’t go anywhere. So it’s basically Mother Earth.

But then the Bringback is birthed in some ways from the Mound, and has agency and is more rambunctious. It’s sort of like the historic imp kind of character, but is there to help us access our memories. And to bring back things from our distant past to help us unlock our future. So as impish as they can be, they’re still there for a pretty positive purpose.

Hrag Vartanian: So some of these characters I’d love to talk a little bit, because to me, they remind me of some type of cosmology or something you’ve created. Do you think of them that way? Or how would you describe them?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah, I would totally describe it as a cosmology. And I think the phrase “world building” is thrown around so much these days, but it’s how I was describing what I wanted to do starting in the year 2000. It’s like I’m building this world, and it’s additive and not subtractive. So there’s a center point that everything kind of answers to. I guess you could say it’s like Stephen King with The Dark Tower. So everything kind of answers back to this one thing. So everything’s connected.

John Yau: And also, you’ve made these characters. You can buy these little characters that you made.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Right.

John Yau: That’s amazing to me. I was like, “Huh.” So where I live in Beacon, I walked in and KAWS had all these figures in the barber shop. I went, “Oh, that’s why people either love him or hate him because he’s everywhere.” And then when I was looking at your characters, I thought, “Oh, maybe Trenton could have dolls next to KAWS’ dolls someday, and the world would be a little better.”

Trenton Doyle Hancock: [Laughs.] Well, yeah. I definitely know him and respect what he’s doing. And we had a great conversation at The Jewish Museum several weeks ago. We were able to talk about how pop culture has brought us to the place that we were at. And for me, these things are at odds. I was always punk without knowing I was punk. I just have this urge to push against certain things. And I hear this from time to time in academia back in the 90s of, “Well, don’t do that because that’s not very sophisticated. Don’t have characters in your work that are identifiable and solid, and definitely not ones that appear from work to work.” Like, the seriality thing. But I was a comic book artist. I was the editorial comics illustrator for the school newspaper all throughout college because I thought, “Well, if this painting thing doesn’t work out, I’ll pitch my stuff to a newspaper.”

John Yau: Sure.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: I was not against that. That was part of me. But I also loved painting and discovery that way. So it was just, “I’ll take my peanut butter and chocolate and put it together and create this new thing for me.”

John Yau: In my memory, you start to show around 2000, is that right? I remember 2001, because I was teaching in Baltimore, and suddenly these two students I had said, “Do you know Trenton Doyle Hancock? Well, you better go look at it.”

Trenton Doyle Hancock: That’s interesting.

Hrag Vartanian: Was that year important for you, or that period?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Well, I had a little bit of a dip back into the 90s, and that’s when I actually first started showing in galleries. So ‘98 was my first one person show. So around 2000, 2001, when your students were talking to you, maybe what they were responding to was I was taking the gallery space and turning that into…I was doing the thing that I was told not to do as a kid. “Don’t write on the walls. You’ll get punished for that.” So I was like, “Okay, I’m going to write on the wall so big that that’s the first thing you see coming in and you see it coming off the street.” You look in the window and it’s just all this text.

Hrag Vartanian: Where was that show?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: At James Cohan Gallery. But I would do it in any museum show, or whatever. It became sort of a thing for me is, that there’s the written counterpart to the characters and the narrative and all that, but then there’s the imagery. So I was like, “Well, why don’t I just have all of that written, as I was seeing it, as concrete poetry?” It’s like, you could just isolate these things and there’s a kind of beauty that I was seeing in the writing part. And then you can hang the paintings on top of that so people can find how they want to enter into this whole thing or fuse it together.

John Yau: So you play a lot of wonderful word games. They kind of reverberate in a viewer’s mind. You’re playing games on lots of different levels and you’re having fun.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And I think, hopefully, I think that’s why we might be sitting here together. Because the way you use poetry seems to be like, well, “The field is totally open.” I’m going to take everything that I’m interested in, all forms of writing, all forms of oral expression, and kind of play this chopped up game, putting it all together. It’s like I was reading this one where you almost embody Yves Klein. And it’s like this kind of role playing almost. And that was amazing.

John Yau: Thank you.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah, I just love seeing how you jumped back and forth.

John Yau: Right.

Hrag Vartanian: I love that. Okay, there’s a couple of questions I still want to get to. This has been amazing actually, already.

So, Mad Magazine. I feel like that’s something that should be talked about, because I think the playfulness comes through that. I think the type of drawing, obviously the common kind of heritage of the sort of drawing with Guston. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with Mad Magazine and how you maybe see its influence linger in your work.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Well, I came to Mad Magazine of course in the late 70s. Its roots were from decades before, and it was still functioning the same way it did before, but now it’s on the news stands and no one’s taking them off and burning them. It was almost like McCarthyism type of trials that was on to get these things, and people were burning piles of them. And so it wasn’t like that when I was a kid, but I would say they were almost like how memes are now. It’s like, you would go to Mad Magazine or Cracked Magazine…there were these variants of it to see how pop culture is being lampooned, how film is being retranslated and taking the steam out of something that takes itself so seriously.

And I always thought it was fascinating that these are grown-ups. It’s not kids making this stuff. These are grown-ups that are making stuff. And I didn’t realize there were other grown-ups reading it. I thought, “Oh, this is just kid stuff that’s for me.” But how sophisticated all that stuff actually was was revealed to me later on. In the 80s, it was all superhero comics, and I didn’t understand that there was underground literature and stuff like that.

John Yau: I don’t think underground comics got to Paris, Texas at that point.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: They did in key places. You had to know where to go. I didn’t know where to go.

Hrag Vartanian: So what were your favorite superheroes?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: The standards, like Spider-Man and Superman.

Hrag Vartanian: Okay.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: But then there was something that happened with Frank Miller in the mid-80s to the kind of late 80s. Things got darker. There was even in the comic realm, artists in the fine art realm were kind of doing this already, but being critical of power structures and things like that.

Hrag Vartanian: The anti-hero?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. Yeah. The anti-hero became the standard.

John Yau: Right.

Hrag Vartanian: Yeah, that’s right. The Dark Knight.

John Yau: That’s right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Dark Knight, all of that. Yeah. The Watchmen. And so I kind of was seeing that out of the corner of my eye, still had everything my feet firmly planted in. It was like, “Oh, I’m going to graduate and go work for Marvel Comics.” And it was like that. But I started seeing that, “Oh, there’s this other thing.” And I didn’t understand. I didn’t know. I couldn’t name the parts of government. I wasn’t a political being at that time, but I knew there was something really special about those types of comics because they made me feel weird when I looked at them. And they made me feel like I needed to do research. It’s like, I’m not well-read enough, but I could read Superman and Spider-Man. It’s just like, “Okay, I get it.” But I liked that there were these comics that were out of my reach, and I wanted to fight to bridge that gap.

John Yau: I want to ask you about materials, because there’s that wonderful piece in the Jewish Museum. It’s divided up, and it’s about the figure morphing. And I was looking at it, and then I realized it’s done with fur. And I was like, “Whoa.” And at first I was like, “Oh, it should have been paint!” And I was like, “John, calm down!” And then it won me over. It was one of those, at first I was like, “Oh.” And then I went, “Whoa.” It was really interesting. And then I started looking, and there’s the bottle caps and different plastic pieces. And I was like, “What’s going on with this?”

Hrag Vartanian: Yeah, I was going to ask about the bottle caps too, because those really fascinate me.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Well, the caps, it’s like the Bringbacks. I was describing them earlier: “Well, what are the things from your childhood?” They don’t always just bring back good things, but most of the time, it’s these comforting things that they bring back. And it was around the year ’96 or ’97 in this campaign to really try to figure out who I was, not who my parents are, not who my friends at school, who society is trying to tell me I am, but who am I? And I’m getting back to this idea of intuition, the things that are beyond speech that we just do, that we are drawn to.

And so I started looking at routines I had as a small child. I would collect plastic tops because I loved the color, I loved the feel of the plastic, I loved the shapes. They were toys to me. So I would take all those from around the house. I’m three, four years old at the time, and I would unscrew them and I’d play with them, mix them in with my toys. And I was like, okay, I’m going to start doing that again. And that’s when Torpedo Boy came back. I went through all my old drawings from the mid-80s when I was 9, 10 years old. I’m like, “Oh, I want that character, and that one. Wouldn’t that be fun to bring back and flesh out with my adult mind? What’s the potential of all of this?”

And so, being a painter, or trying to figure my way through into painting, I thought the plastic of this material and my love of acrylic paint makes sense. It’s like the plastic becomes an extension of the surface, an extension of the material. And it’s kind of a dumb thing. It felt kind of like, “Oh, this is questionable that I should be doing this, so let me move forward with this.” And the fur came around the same time I started using that in the pictures as well. And it’s like, let me make something that looks like it could hang in a kindergarten class, but shouldn’t. It’s deteriorating, and it’s probably might be more corruptive than educational. And so it was striking that balance between something that felt right and wrong, I suppose.

John Yau: Right. That makes sense. But I love the fact that you connect the plastic bottle tops to acrylic. That’s great.

Hrag Vartanian: Especially the colors.

John Yau: I mean then suddenly, when you said that, I’m like, “Oh yeah, all those colors were used to identify what the thing is inside.” Suddenly they’re not normal colors. They’re this invention.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And there’s a purity to it too. Because it has to sit on a shelf and draw you towards it.

John Yau: That’s right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: It’s like a commercial, like an advertising thing. So I felt that. I want that in the picture because I’m responding to the purity of something, not as all mixed up and muddy or anything like that. It’s moments of purity.

John Yau: Right.

Hrag Vartanian: So I want to ask both of you this question: is there something unresolved about Philip Guston’s work that you still think about for yourself? Anything that you feel is unresolved, or you find yourself thinking about again and again? Maybe it’s because there’s something about it that you haven’t fully figured out for yourself?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: For me, he’s going to forever be fascinating because he was able to make that leap, which is beyond logic, to putting himself in the hood and doing those paintings like that in the time that he was doing. It’s like, it just went against all financial and logical sense to do that. What an interesting person. So yeah, he’s going to be forever confounding and kind of dumbfounding to me.

John Yau: And in one of the first paintings he does Klu Klux Klan paintings, he takes out an abstract painting and he paints over it. You can see it on the left-hand side, that he’s really painting over one of his abstract paintings.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Wow. That’s a great gesture.

John Yau: Yeah. I know. I’m interested in how haunted he was, because I think he was haunted by being Jewish, and certainly by the Holocaust. All those piles of bodies. He really is haunted, and yet what he does with it…that he has this guy sitting there, his figure sitting among the bodies…he’s really open to all sorts of things. The ants or the bugs coming down the mountain while he’s painting furiously. And you feel like he’s really dealing with mortality. He’s dealing with all sorts of stuff. So I kind of think that he’s still open to more discussion.

The other thing that really interests me is he’s relevant, and yet he doesn’t feel like he’s trying to be relevant in the way you’re supposed to be relevant, that you’re supposed to say it this way or you’re supposed to be on this side, you’re supposed to do this. And it’s like you can’t pin him down in that way.

Hrag Vartanian: I agree.

John Yau: And that I think is really wonderful. And I think the self-deprecation is really important.

Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely. I agree. Now, do you ever fear becoming The Artist?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: As defined by…

Hrag Vartanian: As yourself. As you define it. Because part of me thinks sometimes we externalize these characters in order to sort of understand them.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. I think probably the reason I separated that character out to get in front of me is he may be the one I am most scared of, because there are no edges to that character. He’s a Dilbert.

John Yau: Right.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Ineffectual. Dumb. Not necessarily ambitionless, but kind of compliant.

John Yau: Compliant.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: And that’s my worst fear.

John Yau: Sure, I understand that.

Hrag Vartanian: So now I thought we’d end, but I wanted to ask one last thing, which is about collecting. I’m not a collector in the way that the art world talks about it, but I love to collect so many random things. I love collecting propaganda. I love collecting these, and I feel like I have a magpie attitude towards it like I’m making a nest or something. I wonder if maybe I put them all in a pile and one day I’ll sleep on top of them or something. I don’t know. But I feel that way about them. I’m wondering about your tendency to collect because I know that’s something that’s very prevalent for you too. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. Well, it’s like I’m not sure what came first, the chicken or the egg here, but I’ve always loved objects. I talked a little bit earlier about my earliest memories is collecting plastic tops. So just being kind of drawn to things and wanting to almost absorb that thing into yourself so you have them in your orbit. Kind of like the child’s separation from the mother, and how that’s so hard because the child sees the mother as part of themselves. It’s like a limb being separated. And I think there’s this feeling that I have with objects. I have this kind of more recent kind of understanding of my autism, however mild it may be, that helped me understand, “Oh, here’s why I did and do the things that I do.” It made me understand, “Oh, this is why you were a little bit outside of the social groups or a little bit of an outcast because your syntax just didn’t match up with everyone’s kind of neurotypical understanding.”

And so part of that is collecting. Trenton Doyle Hancock: It’s like having an object to it and then infusing into that objecthood a kind of person, right? When my mom, this is a story that has probably been written in various interviews with me, but she went through this intense kind of reattachment to her faith in the mid-80s, she started to see my brother and I’s toys and books and things as detrimental to our eternal soul.

John Yau: Oh, that’s right. Yeah, I read that.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. So she burned…I call it the three trials by fire. She burned all the D&D stuff in the fireplace. She burned all of our action figures in the barrel behind the house, and burned all my Garbage Pail Kids, which were basically the Mad Magazine stuff on the sidewalks. She just put them in the barrel, poured gasoline and then lit a match.

John Yau: That is intense.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: So yeah, those things, you’d like to think you get over those kinds of things. It was just so long ago, and it wasn’t like anyone was hurt. But on an emotional level, like I was saying, to someone like me with my condition, I was like, “Oh, this is my stuff. That was my life.”

John Yau: That’s devastating.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Yeah. I don’t think she quite understood what she did. And so that’s why I was saying earlier, “What came first?” Would I be the same collector I am now if she hadn’t done that? But I think it definitely was like, “I got to protect these things. I have to take this stuff in and care and hold it. It may end up in a fire somewhere.”

John Yau: Right.

Hrag Vartanian: That is so damn deep. I feel like I’ve learned something about myself with that story. That’s so deep. How about you, John? What’s collecting or the notion of collecting?

John Yau: I suppose, yeah, at one point someone said, “You’re a collector,” to me. It was sort of unnerving, but I knew the minute… It was actually Tom Miskowski who said it, and I knew he was right. So I collect books, poetry books, novels, and then I love having drawings, but I have way too many. I’ve given some to museums. I’ve tried to give them to museums now and stuff, but there is this part of me that really… I’ve tracked things down like odd things that I wanted to have. I wanted a print by the Japanese printmaker Yoshitoshi. If someone asked you to write an essay, it was Japanese. And I said, “If you’re in Japan, you have to find me a print by him, and I’ll trade you my writing for a print by him.”

So things like that. It was completely impractical. I should have taken the money. But I was like, “No, I really want this thing.” Or there’s certain books. They’re not particularly rare, but they’re not cheap. And I go, “I really want to have a copy of this.” And then I go looking for it. Certain catalogs that I know exist, I will spend months looking for them, waiting for me to find one at the right price.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: No, you’re a real collector.

[All laugh.]

John Yau: Yeah.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: There’s no getting around that.

Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Trenton.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Oh, sure.

Hrag Vartanian: Thank you, John.

John Yau: Sure.

Hrag Vartanian: This was a pleasure to have a conversation like this and being able to explore both your works, but also Guston in a very interesting way. And your show at The Jewish Museum is spectacular.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Thank you.

Hrag Vartanian: And a very good catalog with it, I have to say.

John Yau: It is. It’s a very good catalog.

Hrag Vartanian: It’s a very good catalog with some really good interviews and writing that I think really illuminated so much about two artists. And the selection, the curating, those exhibition design, excellent. And so hopefully, people will go and see them.

John Yau: One of the things about Guston is you want to make him human. And I think that’s one of the things that happens in this show, both in the catalog and with your work is…I mean, he was seen as a kind of God-like figure, certainly at a certain point and understandably. But he’s also very, very human.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Totally.

John Yau: And that’s what I think comes across with this show. It’s like, oh, look at this conversation going on.

Hrag Vartanian: I a hundred percent agree. So thank you so much for joining us and having this conversation.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Sure. Thank you.

Hrag Vartanian: “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out” continues at The Jewish Museum of New York until March 30th, 2025. In case you missed it, though, I highly recommend the excellent catalog that includes an interview with renowned graphic novelist, Art Spiegelman, as well as a lot of images and writing that will help you contextualize and understand the work and its relationship to each other very clearly.

This podcast is edited by our producer, Isabella Segalovich. And now a word about our sponsors. This podcast, as well as all our podcasts, are made possible by our membership. So a big thank you to all our Hyperallergic members. For only $8 a month or $80 a year, you can support the best independent art publication out there. Now, more than ever, we need publications that are fearless in telling the truth. So please consider becoming a member and visit hyperallergic.com for more information.

My name is Hrag Vartanian, the editor in chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic. I’m very happy to be your host of this podcast series, and thank you so much for joining us. Until next time.