美国国家公共电台 NPR An Artist's Alternative Universe And His Warehouse Full Of Dolls

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LAKSHMI SINGH, HOST:

We're going to hear now about Trenton Doyle Hancock. He's a star in the art world, and he collects dolls. He has so many dolls and toys he needs a studio the size of an airplane hangar in which to store them. Hancock's work is in the permanent collections of leading museums, including the Metropolitan¹ Museum of Art.

NPR's Neda Ulaby visited his new show in Philadelphia.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE²: As a child, Trenton Doyle Hancock made up a superhero - Torpedo³ Boy. The character is now the center of a complicated cosmos⁴ Hancock's developed over 30 years. It preoccupies⁵ his drawings, paintings, sculptures and now a stuffed torpedo boy doll.

TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK: Well, he looks like me. He's a black guy. His face is basically my face.

ULABY: Torpedo Boy's a recurring⁶ character throughout Hancock's work and in this exhibition at Temple University's Contemporary Art Museum. The show is intended to reveal the connections between Hancock's massive toy collection and his celebrated⁷ art.

ROBERT BLACKSON: He's on the A-list.

ULABY: Robert Blackson runs Temple Contemporary. He says as soon as Hancock makes work, it's snapped up by fanatical collectors. But he does not cater⁸ to them. Hancock makes art entirely⁹ for himself.

BLACKSON: He has no choice. It's not something that he can walk away from.

ULABY: He's driven, Blackson says, by an intensely personal vision.

BLACKSON: He carries with him wherever he goes. He wears it almost wherever he goes. There's a truth there that you can't escape.

HANCOCK: I'm obsessed¹⁰ with my own childhood.

ULABY: For example, when you walk into this show, you're overwhelmed by bright reds, greens and yellows meant to evoke¹¹ both a toy store and the tile in Hancock's grandma's bathroom. His stepfather was a minister and his mother a devout¹² Christian¹³.

HANCOCK: She had an extreme flare-up of religion (laughter)...

ULABY: And would not let Hancock play with toys she found unwholesome. Partly in response, Hancock created his own fantastical alternative world he calls the moundverse (ph).

HANCOCK: Mounds¹⁵ are these half-human and half-plant creatures. They're kind of these dopey, big mound¹⁴ heaps that can't really move or do anything.

ULABY: The moundverse contains dozens of complex characters, including a goddess who controls color.

HANCOCK: And this color can be manipulated to fuel and different things.

(LAUGHTER)

HANCOCK: I know. It's (laughter) - I live in my own head.

ULABY: Many of the characters in Hancock's head appear in the show as dolls - shiny, plastic ones that are a little bit unnerving. As an African-American kid who did not own lots of black toys, Hancock's fascinated by what makes dolls objects of desire. He used to pore over the Sears catalog, analyzing¹⁶ toy packaging and production as a way of understanding social aesthetics¹⁷.

HANCOCK: Like, what was cute in the '60s isn't what was cute in the '70s and definitely isn't what was cute in the '90s.

ULABY: Hancock collects dolls he finds in thrift¹⁸ stores, often missing clothes and hair. He says that helps reflect on the values placed on skin and bodies. He only buys toys made from 1959 through 1990.

HANCOCK: The rule is, if I come across it at a thrift shop, I have to buy it from those years. (Laughter) That's why I have to have another warehouse¹⁹ to accommodate the collection at this point.

ULABY: Hancock took a group of young aspiring²⁰ curators to the original warehouse last year.

IDA VILLANUEVA: I've never seen so many things - like, toys and colors - all at once. It's - like, that's really the most mind-blowing thing for me.

ULABY: Twenty-one-year-old Ida Villanueva is part of the Young Curators Council at Temple Contemporary. It's a project that trains young people of color from North Philadelphia to be curators. She's using Hancock's character Torpedo Boy as an inspiration for a workshop at a nearby Puerto Rican arts center.

VILLANUEVA: Families are invited - so parents and kids - to make their own superheroes based off of their cultural backgrounds.

ULABY: It's community engagement end, says Temple Contemporary's Rob Blackson, a response to a Mellon Foundation study that showed fewer than 10 percent of museum curators and leaders are black or Hispanic.

BLACKSON: That is way off the charts in terms of our own national census²¹ statistics.

ULABY: And in terms of the neighborhood where Temple Contemporary is located. Blackson also introduced Hancock, who attended Temple's Tyler School of Art, to a woman who runs a museum that's only a few blocks away. The Philadelphia Doll Museum only exhibits black dolls.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: For black children to see an image of theirself (ph) is a very positive experience.

ULABY: A short documentary about the museum is part of Hancock's new show. He collaborated²² with Barbara Whiteman on an exhibit inspired by the Clark doll test, where psychologists asked children in the 1940s to choose between a black and white doll. Most picked the white one. The results helped influence the Supreme²³ Court case Brown v. Board of Education. The black and white dolls packing this room, says Hancock, reflect how toys have historically expressed a more limited range of possibilities for black kids.

BLACKSON: So it's like you're given a few options. It's, like, well, I can be this, this or this. But little white girls can be (laughter) that whole row of them with, like, 50 options.

ULABY: As whimsical as his work with toys might seem, artist Trenton Doyle Hancock says it's rooted in reality.

HANCOCK: And it's a very American reality.

ULABY: One he feels that needs a new mythology²⁴ that reflects American histories and mistakes - the sort of mythology a person might start to invent as a child, maybe while playing with dolls.

Neda Ulaby, NPR News.