Group exhibition
'In Character'
In Character explores how contemporary artists draw from the visual aesthetics of animation, illustration, and sequential art to unpack notions of identity, imagine alternate realities, and depict Black life and community. Across the featured paintings, drawings, sculptures, and textile works, the distinctive language of cartoons and comics emerges through flat, outlined forms, shallow picture planes, and exaggerated bodily features.
Works like Trenton Doyle Hancock’s grand superhero narratives and caricatured self-portraits mythologize personal experience and complicate understandings of power, while Gary Simmons’ painted reinterpretations of early Looney Tunes characters interrogate the origins of racialized stereotypes in cartoons. By leveraging the familiarity of animation, the exhibiting artists demonstrate how popular media have historically flattened Black representation, while simultaneously revealing its potential for experimentation and expansion. In Character underscores the power of these aesthetic traditions as both a form of expression and a method for idealization and self-reinvention.
Featured artists
Trenton Doyle Hancock
Victoria Dugger
Mark Thomas Gibson
Arthur Jafa
Gary Simmons
Kara Walker
Qualeasha Wood
In Character explores how contemporary artists draw from the visual aesthetics of animation, illustration, and sequential art to unpack notions of identity, imagine alternate realities, and depict Black life and community. Across the featured paintings, drawings, sculptures, and textile works, the distinctive language of cartoons and comics emerges through flat, outlined forms, shallow picture planes, and exaggerated bodily features.
Works like Trenton Doyle Hancock’s grand superhero narratives and caricatured self-portraits mythologize personal experience and complicate understandings of power, while Gary Simmons’ painted reinterpretations of early Looney Tunes characters interrogate the origins of racialized stereotypes in cartoons. By leveraging the familiarity of animation, the exhibiting artists demonstrate how popular media have historically flattened Black representation, while simultaneously revealing its potential for experimentation and expansion. In Character underscores the power of these aesthetic traditions as both a form of expression and a method for idealization and self-reinvention.
Featured artists
Trenton Doyle Hancock
Victoria Dugger
Mark Thomas Gibson
Arthur Jafa
Gary Simmons
Kara Walker
Qualeasha Wood
Install Views
Credits
In Character is co-organized by SCAD Museum of Art assistant curator Haley Clouser and curator Ben Tollefson. It is presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2026.
