Hello, LA:

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda, with a dispatch from Matt Stromberg about an important exhibition about how two artists have engaged the Ku Klux Klan.

But first, I want to give you a heads up on a showcase organized by UCLA’s cityLAB on prefab housing, geared at folks who may have lost their homes in the fires. Currently installed in an empty lot in Altadena, it features a variety of prototypes — from kit houses to a 3D-printed model — that can be built at various scales, relatively quickly. Moreover, cityLAB has produced a pamphlet that outlines prefab options. (Download it here.)

The showcase will be on view through November 30th; get the deets at citylab.ucla.edu.

Now, onto the main event — and other bits I’m obsessing over, like…

• Drama at the Palm Springs Art Museum
• The East Wing demolition
• Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

Keep scrolling!

At top is a modular unit by Conex Modular, on view at the Altadena Prefab Showcase organized by cityLAB. (Carolina A. Miranda)

THE CONVERSATION
by Matt Stromberg

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service, 2017. (Trenton Doyle Hancok / James Cohan)

On the surface, the artists Philip Guston and Trenton Doyle Hancock might seem like unlikely bedfellows. Guston was a Jew who hung with the Abstract Expressionists, and late in life took to painting mordant scenes featuring the Ku Klux Klan. Hancock, who is Black and was raised in Texas, has long employed the exaggerated language of comics to engage race, religion, and identity in paintings and wild installations. Guston has, in fact, been a longtime inspiration to Hancock, and for years the younger artist has been engaged in a posthumous dialogue with his spectral mentor.

That dialogue is now visible in Draw Them In, Paint Them Out, which originated at New York’s Jewish Museum last year (curated by Rebecca Shaykin), and is now on view at the Skirball Cultural Center. The show gathers works by both artists that explore how they have engaged the Klan as both literal terror and metaphoric symbol — united by an approach that balances humor with gravitas.

Guston was born in Montreal in 1913 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, but moved to LA as a child. There, he befriended a teenage Jackson Pollock, and both attended — and were expelled from — Los Angeles Manual Arts High School. As a young artist in the 1930s, he painted WPA murals in a social realist style, including an anti-Klan mural that was destroyed during a 1933 raid by the LAPD Red Squad. He transitioned to Abstract Expressionism after moving to New York, gaining wide acclaim.

Philip Guston, Riding Around, 1969. (Estate of Philip Guston / Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In the late 1960s, Guston shocked the art world by returning to his figurative roots, but this time with a cartoonish sensibility: his heavily worked canvases depicted oversized shoes, hands, heads, cups, and famously, white-hooded Klansmen. He portrayed them doing everyday things — driving in cars, smoking cigars, painting — making them look buffoonish rather than threatening. 

The new work was initially met with scathing criticism, but Guston felt that abstraction could not effectively address the social and political tumult of the era.“What kind of man am I,” he once remarked, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.” 

For Guston, the Klan figures were not simply an indictment of American racism, but alter egos — a way for him to contend his own complicity in that system, and the assimilation made possible by his identity as a white Jewish American. (Guston changed his surname from Goldstein as a young man.)

In 2020, Guston’s Klan paintings came under fire again, albeit for different reasons. The major retrospective, Philip Guston Now, was delayed amid concerns that, following the “Summer of Racial Reckoning,” the images of “white-hooded Ku Klux Klansmen needed to be better contextualized for the current political moment.” The show was presented without incident three years later.

 
Trenton Doyle Hancock discusses his work at the Skirball Cultural Center. (Matt Stromberg)

Hancock couldn’t have had a more different upbringing. Born in Oklahoma in 1974, the artist grew up in Paris, Texas, with a strict Christian upbringing that was often at odds with his love of cartoons and comic books. (His mother once put all his action figures and Garbage Pail Kids in a barrel and burned them.) Paris had a long history of racial violence, including the horrendous 1893 lynching and burning of a Black man on the site of the town’s fairgrounds, which Hancock later visited as a child, an experience represented in a video at the start of the exhibition.  

In college, Hancock’s printmaking professor noted that one of his hooded figures looked like a nod to Guston, prompting Hancock to explore Guston’s late work. “It just struck me. I didn’t really have words for it, but I felt this great kinship to it,” he recalled at the press preview. In Guston, he had found an artistic father figure, a painter who freely merged high and low, art history and pop culture. Where Guston’s paintings featured simplified forms and color schemes, however, Hancock is exuberantly maximalist, mixing styles, media, text, and image in frenetic explorations of identity, representation, and history. Over the past 30 years, he has created his own cosmology of characters that rivals the Marvel comic universe.

In 2014, Hancock decided to directly engage Guston in Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw!, a series of 30 black and white panels in which Hancock’s alter-ego, a Black superhero named Torpedoboy, meets Guston’s Klansman. Incised text below each panel describes formative moments from the artists’ lives, alongside episodes in America’s tortured racial past. “Confronting my art grandfather was an opportunity to unpack a lot of things. What was Guston going through? Why did he take on the Klansman as an avatar as a Jewish artist?” Hancock reflected. “Now I’m at this new phase of my career and life where I’m also confronted with this symbol of hate. In the only way I know how, I had to approach this with a kind of humor, but also great respect and understanding that there was a truth that had to be exposed.” 

Trenton Doyle Hancock, The Boys in the Hoods are Always Hard, 2023. (Trenton Doyle Hancock / James Cohan)

Hancock has continued to mine this relationship between his avatar and Guston’s, and it develops across several vibrant canvases now on view at the Skirball. In Step and Screw: The Star of Code Switching (2020), Guston’s hooded figure tries to push assimilation on Torpedoboy, who has been drained of his natural brown tone. In a hilarious send-up of the pottery scene from the film Ghost, another work finds the Klansman teaching drawing to Torpedoboy, who gazes back with admiration. In Lights Out (2023), Torpedoboy turns on his mentor, stabbing him through the head.

As Hancock puts it, these works explore a “slow slippage into the space of power. At what point are you on the other side of the table? At what point have you lost your core identity?” As Torpedoboy realizes he’s been accepted into this elite club, he begins plotting to “take it down from the inside.”

What was intended as a brief detour in his practice has engaged Hancock for more than a decade. Although he intends to put it to rest at some point, it still bears fruit. “Guston painted Klansmen late in life for a few years, then went on to paint other things. How did he know when the work was finished?” Hancock asks. “I think he probably knew when to stop when his hand stopped moving, and my hand hasn’t stopped moving yet.”

AROUND THE INTERNET 

• Amy Sherald withdrew her show from the Smithsonian over censorship fears; it is now open in Baltimore, where it’s drawing crowds.
• US museums have been hard hit by Trump cuts, according to a new survey.
• Conservator Rosa Lowinger writes about how the demolition of the East Wing edits the story of who we are as a nation.
• The Palm Springs Art Museum is in turmoil after several trustees quit over the appointment of a new director.
• The Lucas Museum has set an opening date.
• On December 3rd, violinist Ray Ushikubo will take to the stage at Zipper Hall with an 18th-century violin.
• Signing off with this essay by Brian Merchant about why Victor Frankenstein is the ur-tech bro. (Spoilers ahead!)

Thank you for reading! 🤓🙏

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