THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
23 June 2008
Trenton Doyle Hancock
(The following article is taken from the U.S. Department of State publication, Art on the Edge: 17 Contemporary American Artists.)
"I get a lot of inspiration from garbage that I find, whether it be tops that I pick up out of the bin at the Laundromat, or something that I saw on the side of the road and was so inspired that I had to stop the car and get it and put it in the trunk. There's something about getting something that is free that is appealing to me, for one. But then the things that people throw away...oftentimes they throw them away because they're old. I see these objects that have this patina to them, that have this obvious history. It's been loved and hated and loved again, and ultimately discarded. There's [sic] so many stories to be told within these objects. And oftentimes once they've been thrown away and you find them in the garbage, they're pale imitations of what they once were. And it's just sometimes very intriguing and exciting to see what these objects have become. And so I set them up and then make up my own stories about them."
Web site: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/hancock/clip1.html
"Art: 21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century" © Art21, Inc. 2001, 2003
[Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) studied at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (MFA 2000), and at Texas A&M University, Commerce (BFA 1997). His many awards include a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York City (1999); a Skowhegan Camille Hanks Cosby fellowship for African-American Artists, Maine (1997); and an Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. At the age of twenty-five, Hancock became one of the youngest artists to be included in a Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (2000). He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida (2003); James Cohan Gallery, New York City (2003); Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2002); and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas (2001). Doyle's work has been included in many group exhibitions, and is housed in numerous museum collections including those of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hancock lives and works in Houston.]
