Looking Back at Trenton Doyle Hancock: I Made a Mound City in Miami Dade County
It’s been one week since the 2020 edition of Miami Art Week, and while this year was very different than usual, it was a great celebration of our community’s resilience and of the talent of our local artists and #MiamiArtStrong arts organizations. Locust Projects presented a magical outdoor performance by Mette Tommerup and welcomed a great number of socially-distanced visitors to view Locust Projects’ current exhibitions throughout the week. The week’s energy has us reminiscing on last year’s show with Trenton Doyle Hancock, who brought the heroic adventures of Torpedo Boy and his battles in the Moundverse to Miami with his site-specific installation that featured paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, video and installation—as vehicles for exploring good and evil, authority, race, class, moral relativism, politics and religion, as well as making unapologetic nods to comic books, illustrations, animations, horror films, and toys.
I Made a Mound City in Miami Dade County kicked off on November 16, 2019 with Locust Projects’ 21st Anniversary Benefit Dinner, honoring Craig Robins and celebrating the artist Trenton Doyle Hancock and his latest installation. Held at Locust Projects, guests enjoyed a private preview and opportunity to meet the artist over cocktails in Hancock’s storefront “toy store” and an intimate and unique feast catered by Le Basque in the Main Gallery surrounding Hancock’s Mound #1, (aka The Legend)—the chief protagonist in the artist’s singular epic mythological narrative that has informed his work since 1997. See more image from the night by World Red Eye, here.
Visitors entered the exhibition through Locust’s Storefront, which the artist designed to mimic a commercial toy store displaying shelves of the artist’s custom-designed Moundverse Infants. The dolls, depicting various characters from Hancock’s epic narrative, are “infant” incarnations of Torpedo Boy, Undom Endgle, Bring Back, and Soul. From the Storefront, visitors followed the colorful, hand-painted floor design that mirrors the linoleum quatrefoil tile on the artist’s grandmother’s floor into the Main Gallery. The pattern is found in many of Hancock’s works as a frame or foundation that provides structure to the artist’s characters and stories. The familial reference ties the fantastical nature of the Moundverse with the artist’s real-life history and upbringing, a memory from childhood of sitting on the floor and drawing while seeking to impress family and gain acceptance.
Once in the Main Gallery, visitors were greeted with wall designs that shout out the exhibition’s title in bold letters. Always at play, Hancock arrived at his title, I Made a Mound City by re-arranging of the letters in Miami Dade County. The focal point was a massive, ceiling-height sculpture of The Legend, Mound #1. Visitors could enter the structure through its fabric pelt-like cape entrance to view The Color Crop Experience, an animation of the artist encountering The Legend in the forest. The exhibition also featured early hand-drawn pages from Trenton’s forthcoming 400-page graphic novel, The Moundverse, videos and animations, and a pop-up comic book store, Radiator Comics helmed by its founder Neil Brideau in the Project Room.
To kick off Miami Art Week, we had a book signing of Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Mind of the Mound Critical Mass, followed by a Meet the Artist reception followed by a private family-style supper by Sparky’s BBQ on picnic tables in a tent in Locust Projects’ parking lot hosted by the artist’s galleries, James Cohan, New York, Shulamit Nazarian, LA, and Hales Gallery, London. The night was captured by World Red Eye in the following video:
Trenton Doyle Hancock recently presented an exhibition of new work at James Cohan Gallery titled Something American, and his monumental new textile, Color Flash for Chat and Chew, Paris Texas in Seventy-Two' opened in the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Commissioned by the MFA with support from the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, the textile continued Hancock’s collaboration with Odabashian rug manufacturer and Locust Projects’ Board Member Jaime Odabachian.
Trenton Doyle Hancock: I Made a Mound City in Miami Dade County was made possible, in part, through generous support from the 21st Anniversary Benefit Donor Fund. Major Sponsors include: Craig Robins, Cara and Robert Balogh, Irma and Norman Braman, James Cohan Gallery, Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Vivian Pfeiffer, Chairman, Phillips, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; Supporting Sponsors: Jorge Garcia and Angel Perez, George Lindemann, Podhurst Orsek PA, Debra and Dennis Scholl. Additional support for the exhibition has been provided by Funding Arts Network and Gander & White.
Locust Projects 2019-2020 exhibitions and programming are made possible with support from: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; The National Endowment for the Arts Art Works Grant; Hillsdale Fund; the Albert and Jane Nahmad Family Foundation; The State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; Kirk Foundation, Funding Arts Network, and the Wege Foundation and Locust Projects Exhibitionist and Significant Other members.