Arts & Culture
Prison experience infuses artist’s work
By Danilo Wrightsell
North Carolina native artist Sherrill Roland unveiled his latest collection of work entitled “The Turning Away From,” critiquing the criminal justice system and advocating for the incarcerated after spending nearly a year in jail before he was exonerated in 2013.
“When I walked in at first, I was a bit confused on why I was seeing urinals,” said Nastasia James.
James, a Jamaican-born jewelry designer and art enthusiast who had never heard of Roland’s work, shared her initial thoughts when entering the gallery. “But then I went ahead and read the artist statement and said that it is [a] representation of prison art.”
“The Turning Away From,” marks a new chapter for the Asheville native artist who was released just over a decade ago.
“I’m approaching a long time since I’ve been incarcerated, and the work is removing a lot of myself,”
Roland said this latest project consisted of 19 original sculptures and paintings using materials connected to his time spent in prison. Explaining that he “ Only [used] things I could, touch, eat, or wear while I was incarcerated. So that’s where you get the steel and the Kool-Aid and the glass, the toilets, the fan. ”
This exhibit is Roland’s second exhibition in New York and the opening reception drew a crowd of all colors and creeds, some long-time followers of Roland’s work.
The urinals James was referring to coincide with three sculptures on the main floor of the gallery entitled “Courtship,” which was crafted using old prison urinals and sinks salvaged from Roland’s town of Asheville, N.C. after 2014’s Hurricane Helene.
Danger and duality is a common theme of Roland”s work;
“A toilet is a very intimate domain,” Roland said. “Your bathroom is a very intimate domain. But in prison, you are forced to share this space with somebody else. You’re not choosing.”
Roland shared that the toilets were constructed to resemble familiar gestures like “hugs” to provoke conflicting thoughts about forced courtship and what that means while in prison.
It’s been over a decade since Roland’s exoneration, and he is still grappling with his time in the D.C. Central Detention Facility.
A decade later and the reflection of who Roland was forced to be in jail still remains. His connection to that cell has inspired a different take on traditional portraits, or “abstract portraits” as Sherrill calls them.
Entitled “Portraints”, imagine a 6-foot, run-of-the-mill, sudoku board – but instead of the traditional nine-by-nine numbers, Roland replaces them with his nine-digit federal crime identification number.
“[This is] what the system does by making you into a number in a very reductive way.
And so these abstractions through this Sudoku puzzle is a way of like, um, putting numbers in boxes, um, and then also reducing the person. “
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a Black man is six times more likely to be incarcerated in the United States than a white man is. Black people represent 13.6% of the American population, but account for 53% of 3,200 exonerations in the registry as of August 8, 2022, according to a report from Axios.
Roland shared an even deeper layer behind “PORTRAITS”, the portrait is a reflection of himself; and his father.
“My dad died when I was young. He was shot when I was really young.”, said Roland.