Trenton Doyle Hancock at the Institute of Contemporary Art | University of Pennsylvania
Art21 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) will lecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art this Wednesday, May 14 (7pm). The lecture is held in conjunction with Hancock’s site-specific installation Wow That’s Mean and Other Vegan Cuisine. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Vegans, characters that Hancock first created while a graduate student at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art. The installation at ICA honors the occasion by exploring their formation in detail. Read more about the Vegans here.
Other public programs include a selection of horror films hand-picked by Hancock that screen at the ICA through June. Lucio Fulci’s 1983 film, The Beyond, screens this Wednesday at dusk. Watch a trailer for the horror cult classic on YouTube.
Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco
In 1998, internationally renowned architect Daniel Libeskind was selected to design the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco. On June 8, the CJM will at last open its doors to the public. To celebrate the opening, the Museum and Reboot, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, will host DAWN ’08, an all-night arts and culture festival and celebration of Shavuot. Attendees will have the opportunity to “groove, learn, explore and mingle” at the new building and exhibition space before the doors open to the public the following morning. Tickets for the event go on sale today.
In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis, will be the first in a series of CJM exhibitions that examines the contemporary relevance of Jewish texts from a variety of artistic, cultural, and literary perspectives. The exhibition will begin with historical representations of the creation story and culminate with seven major commissions by living artists including Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) and Matthew Ritchie (Season 3).
CJM is located at 736 Mission Street. To learn more about this 63,000-square-foot building, visit the Museum’s website or listen to their cell phone audio tour.
This weekend: Trenton Doyle Hancock at Arthouse
From March 22 ‚Äì April 27, 2008, Arthouse in Austin, Texas will present the exhibition Cult of Color: Call to Color in conjunction with a new ballet by the same name. The ballet and exhibition are the results of a 2 1/2 year collaborative project between Art21 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), choreographer Stephen Mills, and composer Graham Reynolds, all Texas-based artists. Through installations, music, paintings, drawings, sketches, video collage, and more, the exhibition will “explore the complexity of translating an artist‚Äôs visual world into a compelling, innovative performance including original music and dance.”
Commissioned by Ballet Austin, Cult of Color: Call to Color tells of a battle fought between Hancock’s characters, the gentle Mounds and the mutant Vegans. Key characters include the Vegan minister, Sesom (Moses spelled backwards), a loving character, Painter, and an antagonist, Betto. A violent struggle for power between these forces are at the core of this episode in Hancock‚Äôs ongoing visual narrative.
On Saturday, March 22, from 3-5pm, Arthouse will host a panel discussion with Hancock, Mills, and Reynolds that will be conducted by Robert Faires, Arts Editor at The Austin Chronicle. This program is free and open to the public.
Arthouse is located at 700 Congress Ave., Austin, TX. 78701. Call (512) 453.5312 for more information. Visit the Arthouse website for the list of ballet performances.
Prospect.1 New Orleans Coming in November
Slated as the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States, Prospect.1 New Orleans will open November 1, 2008 and run through January 18, 2009. Founding director and chief curator of this new biennial, Dan Cameron (former Senior Curator of the New Museum and recently appointed Director of Visual Arts of the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in New Orleans) was inspired to organize an exhibition in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The recently announced list of 75+ artists from around the globe includes Art21 artists Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford (both Season 4), Cai Guo-Qiang, Arturo Herrera (both Season 3), Janine Antoni, and Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2).
Calling for a total of 100,000 square feet of exhibition space, Prospect.1 New Orleans will be divided among several buildings in various historic New Orleans neighborhoods, including the Warehouse District, the Bywater, French Quarter, the Marigny, and the Treme. A number of existing institutions and halls - CAC, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art - will be used, along with converted warehouses, commercial structures and other public spaces and found sites throughout the city.
How will Prospect.1 New Orleans help the damaged city? “[It] will contribute to the cultural rebuilding of New Orleans by creating an entirely new narrative about the city, its architecture, and its history. By re-branding the city as a place where the visual arts can thrive, the long-term aim of Prospect.1 New Orleans is to create an entirely new category of cultural tourism for the city, and to broaden its image overall.”
While the Prospect.1 website is good for answers to logistical questions, and briefly addresses the terms “global art” and “biennial,” what is perhaps most important here (as demonstrated in the above excerpt) is attention to the city’s predicament and progress-Prospect.1 tells us the state of things in New Orleans.
For further information and updates, please go to the Prospect.1 New Orleans website.
Trenton Doyle Hancock article in Beautiful/Decay
An article featuring the work of artist Trenton Doyle Hancock was released this week in Issue V of Beautiful/Decay magazine. Hancock was featured in Season 2 of Art:21 in the episode Stories. He debuted as one of the youngest artists to ever exhibit in the Whitney Biennial, shortly after completing his MFA at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.
The article further explains Hancock’s epic saga of the Mounds and the Vegans, which serve as mythical creations in an ongoing narrative illustrated through the artist’s drawings, paintings, collages, sculptures, and installations.
Trenton Doyle Hancock curates exhibition for Cue Art Foundation
Season 2 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock has curated a show of work by Louisiana-based artist Tom Secrest at the Cue Art Foundation gallery in New York City. The exhibition, which opened last night, runs though March 8. Read more about Secrest’s work and Hancock’s curatorial vision on Cue’s website here
Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Reveal in Italy
Reveal is Season 2 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock’s first solo show in a European gallery
All the works on display in Reveal are mixed media using plastic and synthetic fiber on canvas and paper. To enhance the ambience of the space, Hancock also painted the gallery walls with texts describing an imaginary battle between good and evil.
Reveal will be on view at Galleria Marabari in
2007: a brief recap
2007 was a landmark year for many Art21 artists. Apart from the accolades and prizes bestowed upon such artists as Kara Walker, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jessica Stockholder, Kerry James Marshall, and Cai Guo-Qiang, the multitude of exhibitions featuring Art21 artists reflect the pinnacle stages in many of their careers. While this is an achievement in its own right, we wanted to mention some of the other critical kudos recently published in print and online.
For Robert Ayers of ArtInfo.com, the two sculpture retrospectives organized by MoMA last year, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years and Martin Puryear (on view through January 14), are the fourth and fifth best shows of 2007. “Having already visited [Serra’s] show several times, I actually cancelled all of my plans for its final day so that I could see it one last time,” writes Ayers. About Puryear he notes that the artist, “proves himself here a magician of forms that sit happily at the intersection of abstraction and representation and a poet of implied and suggested appearances and meanings.”
As previously cited in December, the top ten exhibitions of 2007 for Time’s Richard Lacayo include those of artists Richard Serra (#1), Vija Celmins (#3), Martin Puryear (#5), and Kara Walker (#6). For Howard Halle of Time Out New York, Serra’s show at MoMA is one of 2007’s best. “Serra put the me in heavy-metal postminimalism, but in this retro of curving labyrinthine slabs, he put you and I and just about everyone else in there, too.” remarks Halle.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the writers from 24 Hour Museum (to be renamed Culture24 this Spring) have their own opinions. Jon Pratty, 24 Hour Museum’s Editor and Head of Content, selected the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern as his top pick. For Pratty, this show (on display through January 20) “was the first in a long time I have seen bringing to life the peculiar talent, skill and craft of a true artist. Everything in her show had been chosen by her, crafted by her, formed by her. It was really inspiring.”
On a more somber note, 2007 sadly marked the death of Season 2 artist Elizabeth Murray, who passed away on August 12. But as Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in the New York Times, “her paintings will be with us for years and years to come.”
Trenton Doyle Hancock wins Artist Prize
Recently, the Studio Museum in Harlem selected Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) as recipient of the 2007 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, established by musician and philanthropist George Wein in memory of his wife Joyce, a collector and strong supporter of the Museum. The prize recognizes and honors the artistic achievements of an African-American artist, who, according to the Museum, “demonstrates great innovation, promise and creativity,” and is seen as an extension of the Museum’s mission “to support experimentation and excellence in contemporary art.” Hancock is the second artist to receive the award. The 2006 inaugural recipient was Lorna Simpson.
Based in Houston, Texas, Hancock has shown in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennials and the 2003 Lyon and Istanbul Biennials. Solo exhibitions include the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and most recently in 2007 the major exhibition Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Wayward Thinker, originating at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and traveling to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Hancock’s work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
For more information on Trenton Doyle Hancock, please visit the artist’s page at http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/hancock/index.html.
MASK: Barney, Tuttle, and Hancock at James Cohan Gallery
On Wednesday, three artists previously featured in Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century take part in a group exhibition at James Cohan Gallery in New York. Entitled MASK, the exhibition explores the forms and uses of masks throughout history and further examines how contemporary artists are influenced by them.
MASK is comprised of a collection of over 40 masks, dating from 700 BC through the 20th century and representative of all continents and many cultural traditions. These masks will be shown alongside works by 30 contemporary artists, including Art21 featured artists Richard Tuttle, Matthew Barney and Trenton Doyle Hancock.
MASK will be on view from December 13 through January 26, 2008.
James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001
View more images from the exhibition here.
