< ART IN THE PARK

August 28, 2010–March 4, 2012
Olympic Sculpture Park, PACCAR Pavilion

For over a decade, Trenton Doyle Hancock has developed a dramatic narrative featuring a cast of colorful—and often not so colorful—characters, who populate a wildly fantastic, invented landscape. Through paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures Hancock’s fiction has become an epic saga chronicling two races: the peace-loving Mounds and the often troubled Vegans, who have lost their ability to see in color. The artist recounts tales of these figures through vivid imagery that reaches mythological proportion and shows evidence of wide-ranging artistic influences, including comics, graphic novels, cartoons, comedic timing, 1970s and 80s music, including the R&B group Full Force, and a variety of film and painting traditions. This spectacular universe is inhabited by characters with names such as Sesom, Betto Watchow, The Legend, Painter, Torpedoboy, and the Miracle Machines. In his site-specific, immersive installation at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Hancock will create a new large-scale sculpture and wall drawings that will continue the imaginative imagery he has developed over the years.

Born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Trenton Doyle Hancock was raised in Paris, Texas and received his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University in Commerce, Texas. He went on to receive an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA in 2000. Upon graduation, he was granted a Core Residency at the MFA, Houston and spent two years as a fellow in that program. Since 2000, he has lived and worked in Houston, Texas. His work was selected for the 2000 and the 2002 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has been exhibited in a number of solo shows both in the US and in the Netherlands, as well as in group exhibitions in New Orleans, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Contemporary Arts Museum, in Houston, and at The Studio Museum in Harlem, to name a few. He is the recipient of an Artadia grant (2003) and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant (1999). He is represented by James Cohan Gallery, New York and Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas, TX.

-Marisa C. Sánchez, Assistant Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at SAM.

The Ossified Theosophied, (Aborted but Beautiful), 2005, Trenton Doyle Hancock, American, born 1974, Color Etching, 19 ½ x 25 inches, Edition of 35, Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York, © Trenton Doyle Hancock; The Bad Promise, 2008, Trenton Doyle Hancock, American, born 1974, mixed media on canvas, 84 x 108 in., Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York, © Trenton Doyle Hancock; Concept Design for Teardrop Pattern, 2009–10, Trenton Doyle Hancock, American, born 1974, Digital rendering created by Graphic Designer, David Johnson Courtesy of the artist and designer, © Trenton Doyle Hancock