{"id":20401,"date":"2026-01-20T17:36:47","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T17:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/20\/with-humor-and-horror-trenton-doyle-hancock-draws-philip-guston-in\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T17:36:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T17:36:50","slug":"with-humor-and-horror-trenton-doyle-hancock-draws-philip-guston-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/20\/with-humor-and-horror-trenton-doyle-hancock-draws-philip-guston-in\/","title":{"rendered":"With Humor and Horror, Trenton Doyle Hancock Draws Philip Guston In"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Trenton Doyle Hancock, known for his bright, fantastical cosmology of characters, interprets, embodies and channels Philip Guston\u2019s legacy in \u201cDraw Them In, Paint Them Out.\u201d Photograph by Sarah Golonka. Courtesy of Skirball Cultural Center.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In September 2003, a segment of PBS\u2019s Art in the Twenty-First Century<\/i><\/a> aired in which a young Trenton Doyle Hancock<\/a> describes his cosmology of characters. The \u201cMoundverse,\u201d as he called it, is a pseudo-Biblical multiverse in which maxims become natural laws and all creatures worship the eponymous Mounds\u2014the Sentinel-esque entities that arose when an ancient hominid ejaculated into a meadow of magic flowers. There is Loid, a black-and-white figure of tension and variegation, at once a lynched Black man and a Ku Klux Klan member. There is Painter, a colorful, voluminous matron spirit. Then there is Torpedoboy\u2014adapted from one of Hancock\u2019s childhood creations\u2014the bald Black man in a garish yellow kit, tidy white briefs and bulbous black boots tasked with protecting the Mounds. \u201cHe\u2019s a superhero, and he\u2019s super strong, except he has an inflated ego,\u201d Hancock said in the program. \u201cHis pride and other human emotions get in the way of him performing his duties.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Within Hancock\u2019s Moundverse, the sordid facts of life\u2014sex, evolution, hierarchy\u2014are stippled with a pulpy, sardonic texture. As Walter Perry once remarked<\/a>, everybody has an anthropology, and Hancock not only bears his with pride, he prunes it with the meticulous gaze of a topiarist. The mechanisms by which Hancock\u2019s anthropology is expressed\u2014the comic panel composition, the material verbosity, the characters that are at once demagogues and demigods\u2014find their roots in stages of his evolution. His youth spent in the Bible Belt provided one seed, the legacy of Jim Crow and anti-Black violence supplied another, the parochial paranoia of 1980s televangelists and Satanic Panic parishioners was yet one more. And if Hancock\u2019s lifelong attachment to comic books, cartoons and action figures was yet another seed, Philip Guston<\/a>\u2019s wry, blobby, freewheeling Klansmen was a full-grown sprout.<\/p>\n

In November 2024, \u201cDraw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston\u201d opened at the Jewish Museum under the curatorial guidance of Rebecca Shaykin<\/a>, tasked with framing work as controversial and politically charged as Guston\u2019s. When Shaykin encountered Hancock\u2014who nursed an almost votive devotion to Guston throughout his professional career\u2014at an art fair, she determined he was uniquely poised to commune with the late artist. In October 2025, the exhibition traveled cross-country to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, a city with its own inglorious history with the Ku Klux Klan. Guston was called to explore the \u201cpsychology of evil\u201d when he abandoned his successful career as an Abstract Expressionist to paint cartoonish slice-of-life scenes of Klan members. Guston\u2019s Klansmen smoked cigars on cabriolet joyrides, awkwardly fraternized in sparse banquet halls, attempted self-portraits of themselves, ghostly hoods still drawn.<\/p>\n

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In Riding Around<\/em> (1969), three of Guston\u2019s Klansmen sit in a top-down jalopy and smoke cigars, with a bumbling, buffoonish air about them. Courtesy of the Skirball Center and the Estate of Philip Guston.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cGuston was very famous for saying that he didn\u2019t want to know what his work was about,\u201d Hancock told Observer. \u201cThe mystery is what keeps him interested. So it\u2019s not about answering questions, it\u2019s about asking more questions. [The paintings] end up being big question marks\u2026 and I appreciate that they are a repository for that kind of thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

The questions that \u201cDraw Them In, Paint Them Out\u201d raises are uncomfortable ones, but they are long overdue. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and widespread reckoning with the legacy of systemic racism, four museums released a joint statement postponing their Guston retrospectives to 2024, \u201ca time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston\u2019s work can be more clearly interpreted.\u201d They would later walk back the postponement to 2022, but the damage was done. It sparked outrage in the art world, with critics deeming it a cowardly, censorious mischaracterization of Guston\u2019s oeuvre. In referring to his banal Klansmen as \u201cself-portraits,\u201d Guston was perhaps acknowledging his own complicity in the pedestrianism of racism. By painting himself as the sitter beneath the hood, he held the viewer as his portraitist, his co-conspirator. This paradox was a touchstone for Guston\u2014that he, and civil society, could so efficiently compartmentalize a world riddled with hate and evil. That Klansmen were not phantoms, but people who might also attend social events on the weekend and take up painting in their free time between enacting terror. This reckoning constituted, among other things, a return to form.<\/p>\n

Guston, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, grew up in Los Angeles in the late 1910s and 1920s, and was undoubtedly witness to the active presence of the Ku Klux Klan within the city. Klansmen, many of whom were part of the Los Angeles Sheriff\u2019s Department, targeted minority groups in Southern California, particularly Black and Jewish folks. Owing perhaps to an inability to establish financial stability or the pervasive racial violence of the city, Guston\u2019s father committed suicide in 1923. Guston, then a young child, was the one to discover him hanging in the shed.<\/p>\n

By the age of 17, Guston was rendering scenes of Klan violence in the artistically acceptable social realist style. In Drawing for Conspirators<\/i> (1930), a central hooded figure kneels in front of a brick wall, toiling away at a rope. The figure\u2019s congregation mingles behind him; beyond the wall, a cross is being raised and a Black man hangs from a tree. In a 1933 mural commissioned by the Hollywood branch of the John Reed Society, a Black man is tied to a post, his face obscured, his limbs twisting with pain as a Klansman lashes him with a whip.<\/p>\n

The mural was one of many included in the \u201cNegro America\u201d exhibition arranged by the John Reed Society to publicize and condemn the unjust Scottsboro Boys trial. Over a dozen artworks, including Guston\u2019s, were destroyed by the LAPD\u2019s \u201cRed Squad\u201d\u2014organized to curb \u201cradical\u201d activity\u2014and the KKK. Both of these revelatory pieces are included in the exhibition, where they hang alongside early renderings of Hancock\u2019s Loid.<\/p>\n

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Guston\u2019s Klansman tutors Hancock\u2019s artist avatar in plotting revenge against the KKK in The Boys in the Hoods are Always Hard<\/em> (2023). Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York via Skirball Cultural Center.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


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In Judgment #2<\/i> (2000), Loid\u2019s outline blazes into negative space, the shadow of a hammer emerges from the hem of his cloak, tendrils of text extend from his body. People and passersby are punctured with Loid\u2019s sabers scrolled with the sentence, \u201cYou deserve less.\u201d Properties of the Hammer<\/i> (1994), Hancock\u2019s first Loid, was also his first confrontation with white supremacist violence. In the sepia photograph, Hancock\u2014who, at the time, was a 19-year-old taking a printmaking course at East Texas State University\u2014sits beneath a white sheet, a rope drawn into a noose loops around his neck and trails down his arm, which is holding a hammer. As remarked upon by Emily Waldman for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin<\/i>, Hancock\u2019s work\u2014and particularly Properties of the Hammer<\/i>\u2014echoes W.E.B. Du Bois\u2019 theory of \u201cdouble consciousness,\u201d wherein modern-day Black people split their regard for their community between their lived experience and the negative associations placed onto said communities. Loid, with his blind and righteous rage, opens a window into Hancock\u2019s own feelings of fracture and estrangement\u2014his own \u201cdouble consciousness.\u201d A condition intensified by his upbringing, particularly growing up in a Baptist community where his most prized possessions\u2014his Dungeons & Dragons<\/i> set, his Garbage Pail Kids<\/i> cards and his comic books\u2014were deemed demonic and thus confiscated and burned by his mother. It is from this period of his life that the first iteration of Torpedoboy was born.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of my characters are created out of a need,\u201d Hancock explained. \u201cI have become my characters, and I\u2019ve described the act of becoming the characters as a way of understanding them, but also to embody them\u2026 And I think the characters are there for me to see myself through them in terms of a past, present and future. For me, art is therapy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Upon seeing Properties of the Hammer<\/i>, Hancock\u2019s printmaking professor, Thomas Seawell<\/a>, asked if Hancock was familiar with Philip Guston. When the young artist said he was not, Seawell lent him a copy of Robert Storr<\/a>\u2019s 1986 monograph, and Hancock came to regard it as a sacred text. He marveled at Guston\u2019s treatment of color and form, his scrutiny of routine, his engagement in contradiction. He frequently refers to Guston as his \u201cartistic grandfather.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In Trenton Doyle Hancock\u2019s Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service<\/em> (2017), Guston\u2019s Klansman offers an apple to Torpedoboy in a visual representation of artistic exchange. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York via the Skirball Cultural Center.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2017, an assortment of white nationalist groups and militants took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia to express outrage over the removal of Confederate monuments within the city, chanting \u201cWhite lives matter!\u201d and \u201cJews will not replace us!\u201d That same year, Hancock painted Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service<\/i>. The painting represents a spiritual encounter between Guston and Hancock by way of their avatars\u2014the Klansman and Torpedoboy. Guston\u2019s Klansman extends an apple\u2014a fruit of knowledge and of sin\u2014to Hancock\u2019s Torpedoboy. Dialogue is excised into their bodies. They appear before each other as though removed from reality\u2014set against a lattice patterned over kaleidoscopic greenery. They appear not as the meeting of two tangible beings, but as a meeting of two alter egos\u2014two double consciousnesses. Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service<\/i> was the first work of Hancock\u2019s that curator Rebecca Shaykin encountered, and in it, she saw potential for intergenerational dialogue.<\/p>\n

If Guston navigated the psychology of evil through his art, then Hancock arrives at the pathology\u2014the bloody, pulsating core. Paris, Texas Fairgrounds<\/i> (2024) serves as an effective preface to the visual language employed in \u201cDraw Them In, Paint Them Out.\u201d A small niche situated at the front of the exhibition, Paris, Texas Fairgrounds<\/i> projects colorful clips of the Paris, Texas Fair\u2014bobbing rubber ducks, a whirling Gravitron, a bundle of white-ribboned balloons\u2014onto a mesh screen, juxtaposing them with black-and-white records and recollections of Henry Smith, the 17-year-old Black boy executed in 1893 by Klan members on the very same fairgrounds where the Paris, Texas Fair is held today. Hancock said that the fair was a pillar of his childhood, and it was not until adulthood that he learned about its grisly history.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis carnival would come, and it was just otherworldly,\u201d Hancock said, reminiscing on the fair of his childhood. \u201cIt was really amazing\u2014the lights, the food, the people\u2014and it\u2019s just this atmosphere of joy. Fast forward 40-something years when I actually learned about what happened there in the late 1800s with Henry Smith, and it was very difficult to reconcile that something like that happened in the same space that I had partitioned as this space of joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the dim enclosure of Paris, Texas Fairgrounds<\/i>, the viewer\u2019s shadow is cast upon the filtered images of childhood delight and historical horror, thus bringing them into the dialogue\u2014embroiling them in the legacy of white supremacy. This is the function that overhangs both Guston\u2019s and Hancock\u2019s work, and it is the driving factor behind \u201cDraw Them In, Paint Them Out\u201d: that racial reckonings can be derived from places of joviality and of humor.<\/p>\n

Much of Hancock\u2019s artwork interacting with Guston\u2019s legacy leverages the baseline humor utilized by both. In the 30-panel comic Epidemic! Presents: Step And Screw!<\/i> (2014), arranged on three walls of a makeshift shed illuminated under a hanging lightbulb, Hancock fixes his history\u2014his personal evolution and that of his \u201cMoundverse\u201d\u2014upon Guston. On one parallel, Hancock timelines his and Guston\u2019s anthropology within the comic captions:the fictional apotheosis of Torpedoboy, the death of Philip Guston, the 1984 debut of Wim Wenders\u2019 cult classic Paris, Texas<\/i>. On the other parallel, the illustrative panels, Torpedoboy is beseeched by a stranger to help screw a lightbulb into a woodshed. Reluctantly, he agrees, stepping into the shed. The panel is completely black but for the figures of Guston\u2019s Klansman and Hancock\u2019s Torpedoboy. It\u2019s an exercise in dramatic irony, as we see Torpedoboy screw in the lightbulb in the blackened room, only to find that he is surrounded by Klansmen, under a lightbulb looming overhead like a noose.<\/p>\n

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In Guston\u2019s Meeting<\/em> (1969), anonymous Klan members gather under a bare bulb, disparate, awkward and seemingly silent. Courtesy of the Estate of Philip Guston via the Skirball Cultural Center.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some have postulated that the lightbulbs in Guston\u2019s work could have been a possible expression of his grief and trauma over his father\u2019s death. They appear in much of his Klansmen tableau, including one piece in \u201cDraw Them In, Paint Them Out,\u201d Meeting<\/i> (1969), in which dawdling Klansmen take an awkward recess underneath a conspicuous lightbulb. In panel no. 18\u2014the one with the corresponding caption charting out Guston\u2019s death in 1980\u2014his Klansman passes Torpedoboy a lightbulb. It reads as if Guston bestowed his work of social satire unto Hancock. Yet Hancock insists, in the audio descriptions<\/a> accompanying some of the artworks in the exhibition, that this was purely coincidental. There are many occurrences like these in which Guston\u2019s and Hancock\u2019s paths and designs converge inadvertently. In Hancock\u2019s view, they emerge almost as evocation\u2014as the result of an everlasting artistic s\u00e9ance.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the information lines up in such a perfect way that no one\u2019s going to believe me,\u201d Hancock explains. \u201cThat there\u2019s these magical alignments that propel the work forward and let me know that I might be doing the right thing. So I try to leave space for that kind of validation from some mystical source that allows the work to resonate not just with me but for other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDraw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston<\/a>\u201d is on view at the Skirball Center through March 1, 2026.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

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The exterior of Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw!<\/em> (2014) evinces the dueling narratives and overlapping identities explored within the full piece. Photographed by Sarah M Golonka. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York via the Skirball Cultural Center.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More exhibition reviews<\/b><\/h3>\n

\t\t\t\t\"With<\/p><\/div>\n