Sherrill Roland’s Powerful Work Documents the Journey From Incarceration to Artistry
How he turned the “structurally embedded prejudice” of a jumpsuit, letters from prison, and commissary into art
Click here to read on Architectural Digest (Clever)
Sherrill Roland spent his first year of graduate school for studio art at UNC Greensboro, North Carolina, silently fighting for his innocence against a wrongfully targeted warrant. Sherrill was sure the prosecution team, dedicated to a case of evidence against him, wouldn’t find anything—and they didn’t. Unfortunately, the power of the system traditionally gets what it wants. So, in the spring of 2013, with one whole year of school behind him, Sherrill was sentenced to one year and 30 days in the D.C. Jail. With his head down, the 29-year-old served his full sentence.
It’s no surprise that anyone’s involvement with the carceral system greatly impacts their career development upon reentry to society; background checks in particular limit incarcerated individuals’ access to a myriad of industries. So, with a mound of graduate school debt and a child born while he was incarcerated, Sherrill understandably had no intention of returning to his studio. “I had been dragged along thinking that I wouldn’t get my record clear, so I had already formulated the idea [that] I couldn’t go back to school for art,” he says. But then in December of 2015, Sherrill was exonerated of all charges. Suddenly, the barrier to entry imposed by a criminal legal record no longer existed. So, eventually, Sherrill came around to the idea of finishing his degree.
Of course, things were drastically different. During his first year of mentally living between D.C. (where his warrant lived) and Greensboro (where he attended school), Sherrill says he hadn’t necessarily strengthened his MFA reputation. “I was closed in so many ways,” he says. “It affected my ability to make true work [and] caused a lot of static in my practice.” He struggled to find the ability to freely discuss where he was in life, while also dealing with the emotional responses that come with incarceration of any kind.
When he resumed school in the fall of 2016, Sherrill strove to make what he was going through visible. The result was the Jumpsuit Project, a school year-long performance piece wherein Sherrill donned his former orange uniform and embodied his carceral routine on UNCG’s campus. As a part of his performance, his academic landscape became a mirror of D.C.’s correctional institution. Sherrill used the rules that constrained him on the inside to migrate through spaces on the outside: “The art building was my block, so I could wear shorts in there. When I left my block, I had to go from point A to point B, so if anybody stopped me to chat I’d ask them to escort me to said point B. When I moved, when my body was in this suit, it adhered to correctional rules.”
Subconsciously, classmates and campus visitors also reflected these rules. Sherrill witnessed how everyone, from students to campus police to professors, would react to his suit in ways that ultimately triggered him, especially when he felt as if he needed to convince them of his morality and humanity. As more time passed Sherrill says that he gained comfort in knowing that he was deconstructing something much larger than his own experience. He understood how the suit was “structurally embedded in prejudice,” and was thereby confronting a society that has been conditioned to react negatively to a man in orange.
As his relationship with the project deepened, so too did its reach. After graduate school, Sherrill went national with his work—from a 6.3-mile walk across D.C. to a seven-by-nine-foot pace at the steps outside the Brooklyn Public Library—all the while engaging passersby on what incarceration really looks like in this country. When COVID hit, Sherrill returned to his studio roots and began making work that still interrogated carceral spaces outside of his body.
While inside, formerly incarcerated folks are often forced to get creative, given their deprivation of resources—making gourmet meals out of Cheetos, painting with melted Skittles, building curriculums out of dated magazine issues, and even interior designing their cells. “We were going without so much, we had to be inventive,” Sherrill says. “So I wanted to challenge myself with these same limited tools.” What manifested was Sherrill’s latest exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City, “Hindsight Bias.” The exhibition is a collection of four sculptures with the physical and symbolic makeup of carceral material, and it ends this Saturday, February 5.
There are hanging acrylic envelopes that feature stamps from the Department of Corrections stating they do not take responsibility for any content written by incarcerated residents (ironic, as Sherrill points out, that they relinquish ownership of a space where they feign owning its human beings). There are three cinder-block etched sculptures, outlined by blue and red Kool-Aid, inspired by the touches of home Sherrill found inside jail: The cinder-block cell walls he would trace while thinking about home, paired with the nostalgic joy of Kool-Aid mix.
What follows are two transparent cubes that separately frame a basketball hoop and a see-through prize bag of commissary goods, which is a reference to how even when Sherrill and his incarcerated neighbors would create basketball tournaments with prizes, they were still confined and surveilled by guards. And, perhaps most sentimentally, Sherrill has overlaid words from Valentine’s Day letters that he wrote to the mother of his child while incarcerated laser-etched in acrylic to resemble the security glass.
Each sculpture could certainly have its own article outlining every material used, its relation to Sherrill’s time inside, and how he mentally untangled his lived experience from the outside. That’s because Sherrill’s intentionality is beautifully complex; and, moreover, it is a key example of why systems-involved individuals are an asset to the artistic community.
Historically, the world of art and design has been accessible to those of a certain economic status and race. Even though power dynamics are slowly-but-surely shifting in regards to diversifying perspectives, the art and design world still mimics other industries when it comes to formerly incarcerated individuals. When we talk about life after incarceration, we discuss the rights many systems-involved individuals unjustly scramble to have—from housing to a GED. But what of the rights that climb Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? What of the artists themselves?