With Humor and Horror, Trenton Doyle Hancock Draws in Philip Guston

<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-1607381 size-full-width" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/20251015_Installation-Fall-Exhibitions_Sarah-Golonka_001-e1766571057699.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A museum gallery wall painted bright yellow features large text reading “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston.” A large photograph of the artist standing among colorful artworks is centered, with polished wood floors and clean, open exhibition space.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’Trenton Doyle Hancock, known for his bright, fantastical cosmology of characters, interprets, embodies and channels Philip Guston&#8217;s legacy in &#8220;Draw Them In, Paint Them Out.&#8221; <span class=”media-credit”>Photograph by Sarah Golonka. Courtesy of Skirball Cultural Center.</span>’>

In September 2003, a segment of PBS’s Art in the Twenty-First Century aired in which a young Trenton Doyle Hancock describes his cosmology of characters. The “Moundverse,” as he called it, is a pseudo-Biblical multiverse in which maxims become natural laws and all creatures worship the eponymous Mounds—the 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—adapted from one of Hancock’s childhood creations—the bald Black man in a garish yellow kit, tidy white briefs and bulbous black boots tasked with protecting the Mounds. “He’s a superhero, and he’s super strong, except he has an inflated ego,” Hancock said in the program. “His pride and other human emotions get in the way of him performing his duties.”

Within Hancock’s Moundverse, the sordid facts of life—sex, evolution, hierarchy—are stippled with a pulpy, sardonic texture. As Walter Perry once remarked, 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’s anthropology is expressed—the comic panel composition, the material verbosity, the characters that are at once demagogues and demigods—find 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’s lifelong attachment to comic books, cartoons and action figures was yet another seed, Philip Guston’s wry, blobby, freewheeling Klansmen was a full-grown sprout.

In November 2024, “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston” opened at the Jewish Museum under the curatorial guidance of Rebecca Shaykin, tasked with framing work as controversial and politically charged as Guston’s. When Shaykin encountered Hancock—who nursed an almost votive devotion to Guston throughout his professional career—at 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 “psychology of evil” when he abandoned his successful career as an Abstract Expressionist to paint cartoonish slice-of-life scenes of Klan members. Guston’s Klansmen smoked cigars on cabriolet joyrides, awkwardly fraternized in sparse banquet halls, attempted self-portraits of themselves, ghostly hoods still drawn.

“Guston was very famous for saying that he didn’t want to know what his work was about,” Hancock told Observer. “The mystery is what keeps him interested. So it’s not about answering questions, it’s about asking more questions. [The paintings] end up being big question marks… and I appreciate that they are a repository for that kind of thinking.”

The questions that “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out” 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, “a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.” 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’s oeuvre. In referring to his banal Klansmen as “self-portraits,” 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—that 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.

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’s 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’s father committed suicide in 1923. Guston, then a young child, was the one to discover him hanging in the shed.

By the age of 17, Guston was rendering scenes of Klan violence in the artistically acceptable social realist style. In Drawing for Conspirators (1930), a central hooded figure kneels in front of a brick wall, toiling away at a rope. The figure’s 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.

The mural was one of many included in the “Negro America” exhibition arranged by the John Reed Society to publicize and condemn the unjust Scottsboro Boys trial. Over a dozen artworks, including Guston’s, were destroyed by the LAPD’s “Red Squad”—organized to curb “radical” activity—and the KKK. Both of these revelatory pieces are included in the exhibition, where they hang alongside early renderings of Hancock’s Loid.

In Judgment #2 (2000), Loid’s 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’s sabers scrolled with the sentence, “You deserve less.” Properties of the Hammer (1994), Hancock’s first Loid, was also his first confrontation with white supremacist violence. In the sepia photograph, Hancock—who, at the time, was a 19-year-old taking a printmaking course at East Texas State University—sits 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, Hancock’s work—and particularly Properties of the Hammer—echoes W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of “double consciousness,” 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’s own feelings of fracture and estrangement—his own “double consciousness.” A condition intensified by his upbringing, particularly growing up in a Baptist community where his most prized possessions—his Dungeons & Dragons set, his Garbage Pail Kids cards and his comic books—were 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.

“All of my characters are created out of a need,” Hancock explained. “I have become my characters, and I’ve described the act of becoming the characters as a way of understanding them, but also to embody them… 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.”

Upon seeing Properties of the Hammer, Hancock’s printmaking professor, Thomas Seawell, asked if Hancock was familiar with Philip Guston. When the young artist said he was not, Seawell lent him a copy of Robert Storr’s 1986 monograph, and Hancock came to regard it as a sacred text. He marveled at Guston’s treatment of color and form, his scrutiny of routine, his engagement in contradiction. He frequently refers to Guston as his “artistic grandfather.”

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 “White lives matter!” and “Jews will not replace us!” That same year, Hancock painted Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service. The painting represents a spiritual encounter between Guston and Hancock by way of their avatars—the Klansman and Torpedoboy. Guston’s Klansman extends an apple—a fruit of knowledge and of sin—to Hancock’s Torpedoboy. Dialogue is excised into their bodies. They appear before each other as though removed from reality—set 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—two double consciousnesses. Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service was the first work of Hancock’s that curator Rebecca Shaykin encountered, and in it, she saw potential for intergenerational dialogue.

If Guston navigated the psychology of evil through his art, then Hancock arrives at the pathology—the bloody, pulsating core. Paris, Texas Fairgrounds (2024) serves as an effective preface to the visual language employed in “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out.” A small niche situated at the front of the exhibition, Paris, Texas Fairgrounds projects colorful clips of the Paris, Texas Fair—bobbing rubber ducks, a whirling Gravitron, a bundle of white-ribboned balloons—onto 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.

“This carnival would come, and it was just otherworldly,” Hancock said, reminiscing on the fair of his childhood. “It was really amazing—the lights, the food, the people—and it’s 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.”

In the dim enclosure of Paris, Texas Fairgrounds, the viewer’s shadow is cast upon the filtered images of childhood delight and historical horror, thus bringing them into the dialogue—embroiling them in the legacy of white supremacy. This is the function that overhangs both Guston’s and Hancock’s work, and it is the driving factor behind “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out”: that racial reckonings can be derived from places of joviality and of humor.

Much of Hancock’s artwork interacting with Guston’s legacy leverages the baseline humor utilized by both. In the 30-panel comic Epidemic! Presents: Step And Screw! (2014), arranged on three walls of a makeshift shed illuminated under a hanging lightbulb, Hancock fixes his history—his personal evolution and that of his “Moundverse”—upon Guston. On one parallel, Hancock timelines his and Guston’s anthropology within the comic captions:the fictional apotheosis of Torpedoboy, the death of Philip Guston, the 1984 debut of Wim Wenders’ cult classic Paris, Texas. 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’s Klansman and Hancock’s Torpedoboy. It’s 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.

Some have postulated that the lightbulbs in Guston’s work could have been a possible expression of his grief and trauma over his father’s death. They appear in much of his Klansmen tableau, including one piece in “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out,” Meeting (1969), in which dawdling Klansmen take an awkward recess underneath a conspicuous lightbulb. In panel no. 18—the one with the corresponding caption charting out Guston’s death in 1980—his 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 accompanying some of the artworks in the exhibition, that this was purely coincidental. There are many occurrences like these in which Guston’s and Hancock’s paths and designs converge inadvertently. In Hancock’s view, they emerge almost as evocation—as the result of an everlasting artistic séance.

“Some of the information lines up in such a perfect way that no one’s going to believe me,” Hancock explains. “That there’s 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.”

“Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston” is on view at the Skirball Center through March 1, 2026. 

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