Thursday, January 16, 2025
6:30 – 7:30 pm EST
Scheuer Auditorium

This program is at capacity. If you have questions or would like to receive advance notification about future programs, please email info@thejm.org.

Join artists Trenton Doyle Hancock and KAWS for a discussion about their wide-ranging graphic influences and the world of characters each has built over their respective careers. This conversation, moderated by Dan Nadel, Curator-at-Large for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, is held in conjunction with the current exhibitions Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston (at the Jewish Museum through March 30, 2025) and The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection (at the Drawing Center through January, 19, 2025).

Tickets: $15 General; $10 Students, Seniors and Jewish Museum members
Doors open at 6 pm; Includes Museum admission

About the Speakers:

Trenton Doyle Hancock is a multifaceted artist based in Houston, Texas whose work draws on the language of comics to challenge and comment on the American condition, notably, the pernicious and persistent threat of racism, past and present. Part fictional, part autobiographical, Hancock pulls from his own personal experience, art historical canon, comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop culture references, resulting in a complex amalgamation of characters and plots possessing universal concepts of light and dark, good and evil, and all the grey in between. Hancock earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia.

KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, graphic and product design, and large-scale sculptures. Over the last two and a half decades, KAWS has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times.

Dan Nadel is the Curator-at-Large for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. His biography of Robert Crumb is forthcoming from Scribner in April 2025. Nadel’s books include It’s Life as a I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940-1980; Peter Saul: Professional ­Artist Correspondence, 1945–1976; The Collected Hairy Who Publications; Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900-1969, and Gary Panter. Nadel has curated exhibitions for galleries and museums internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has curated monographic exhibitions on artists including Mike Henderson, Kathy Butterly, William T. Wiley, and Mary Heilmann. Other curatorial projects include What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art: 1960 to the Present in Providence and New York; Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters 1973-1977 in Los Angeles; Gertrude Abercrombie, New York; Red Grooms, Handiwork 1955-2018, New York; and Spain Rodrigiuez: Hard-Ass Friday Nite, New York.