Roland makes art about wrongful conviction, wins Gibbes Museum’s 1858 prize

The Gibbes Museum’s annual 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art awards $10,000 to an artist whose work contributes to a new understanding of the South. The 2023 winner, Sherrill Roland, gave a Feb. 9 talk at the museum about his multimedia art practice which combines installation, sculpture and performance to describe his experience serving 10 months in prison for a crime he was later exonerated for.

In his Feb. 9 talk, Roland revealed he uses only materials he could touch while incarcerated — acrylic, concrete, paper; with the most unconventional of those being Kool Aid, which comes up often in his works, especially those that play conceptually off of red/green color blindness tests.

“I’m just as likely to meet another man that’s been convicted as I am likely to meet another man that’s red-green colorblind,” Roland explained.

Now on view in the Mary Jackson modern and contemporary gallery at the Gibbes, Boneyard by Sherrill Roland hangs alongside works by fellow winners of the prize like Raheleh Filsoofi (2022), Stephanie J. Woods (2021) and Stephen L. Hayes Jr. (2020).

The co-chairs of the Society 1858 board said Roland was the prize winner this year for his “resounding originality.”

The ‘why’ behind his work — a wrongful conviction

In August 2012, the North Carolina born artist Roland was set to attend his first week of grad school, an MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While packing, Roland received a life-altering phone call from a Washington D.C. number, where he had spent time after his bachelor’s degree teaching computer coding to teens at a tech camp in Baltimore.

He figured the phone call might be from a friend with a new number — but the gravely serious voice on the other end of the line was that of a detective who informed Roland there was a warrant out for his arrest. The detective would not say what the charge was, but he did say the alleged crime had taken place in Washington and Roland needed to travel there and turn himself in immediately.

Roland showed up in a tie and a belt and brought his cell phone, all of which were taken when he turned himself in. He didn’t bring a lawyer.

The next several years of his life were taken over by this situation: He finished the first year of grad school on temporary release while awaiting his trial in D.C. After the felony charges were reduced to misdemeanors, Roland was given a bench trial, appearing before a judge without a jury, and he was convicted of a crime he said he did not commit. Roland was sentenced to one year and 30 days, of which he served more than 10 months in a D.C. facility before being exonerated in 2015.

Roland described the harrowing experience in his Feb. 9 talk as “being dragged around, without a voice.”

Several states and the federal government offer $50,000 per year for people wrongly convicted in federal court, Roland explained, but “time moves differently when you’re incarcerated.” He missed the birth of his daughter and the deaths of his two grandmothers. “These moments can’t be measured monetarily,” he said.

Now, he’s making artwork to reflect on the experience: The tumultuous year of waiting for his trial, his incarceration and the grueling process of adjusting to his second year of graduate school upon his exoneration and release.

As he described in his Feb. 9 talk, his artwork after the experience was very direct with its handling of this subject matter, and in his most recent works, like the one currently on view at the Gibbes, he’s found a way to abstract the message and find new meanings through making.

The Jumpsuit Project

Post-release, Roland reapplied and returned to his MFA program, where he pulled off an iconic 2017 performance art piece titled The Jumpsuit Project. (He has since performed iterations of the work at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem to Los Angeles’s Otis College of Art and Design, as well as the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.)

The project plays off of a constant theme in Roland’s work — challenging beliefs of what we can and cannot talk about.

As Roland put it, he was initially hesitant to discuss his ordeal because he wasn’t sure how it would be received. But rather than hide the experience, he created The Jumpsuit Project, where Roland wore an orange jumpsuit whenever he was on campus to provoke conversation about how people view those whom society has labeled criminals.

“Attempts to repress and ignore the imprisonment experience, while common, were altogether unsuccessful and unproductive,” Roland said in his artist statement for the work. “I found liberation in sharing my story with family and friends and discovered that others found a similar release when sharing their experiences in return.”

In another version of the project, he lays down orange tape on the floor to approximate a 7-by-9 foot prison cell and discusses his experience with those who step inside. The resulting dialogue from this project continues to inspire and ignite his practice, he said.

Abstracting the experience

A more recent piece titled Home and Away consists of a clear plexiglass cube that, when laid out on the floor, is the size of a half basketball court. But with the walls up as Roland presents it, the acrylic cube makes a see-through prison cell. It was inspired by an experience while incarcerated when Roland and his fellow prisoners were celebrating March Madness, he explained on Feb. 9.

They were set to hold a 3-on-3 game with some of the “old-timers,” and everyone was excited for it, he said, but the correctional guards ended up canceling the game because their views of the inmates were obscured. The work, Roland said, deals with layers of accessibility and transparency, seeing ourselves and seeing others. A detail in the work is of a clear plastic bag with commissary items, like Top Ramen and Kool-Aid. Even the prizes in this game had to remain visible.

This work, like many in Roland’s oeuvre, also involves the viewer’s bodily participation, asking you to consider your body existing in a cell where you are constantly surveilled. Shapes in his work often refer to that bodily experience of living in a cell — he uses small rectangle shapes to mimic his mail slot, for example.

“I made this work from this idea of dreaming of home,” he said on Feb. 9. “When I was incarcerated, what was it exactly about home that I missed?”

And what he discovered, he said, is he mostly missed abstract feelings: safety, trust and freedom.

The experience of living in this environment changed Roland, he said, so he began expressing that part of the experience by using materials that are, like him, changed by their surroundings. In Boneyard, the work on view at the Gibbes, Roland uses concrete and paper pulp — materials that comes from the Earth, become malleable with water, and once dry, can crack, freeze or crumble — this serves as a parallel to the bodily experience of being changed by a place or an experience, Roland said.

You’ll find more examples of this material storytelling in installation works like Conflict Resolution, where three double-headed fans blow slowly with serrated arms resembling weapons, or Red Times, where varnished text on dark paper says something different based on where you stand. This piece in particular talks about inmate firefighters who were willing to risk their lives by fire for a shot at freedom.

And the Kool-Aid motif has become another important piece of Roland’s language (a perishable, slowly-changing source of color). After he’d been using the motif for a few years, he took a look back at the Kool Aid comics, where the character originates, and found empathy for the villainous characters called the “thirsties.”

“I started feeling for them,” Roland said in his lecture. “They show how you might be incapable of seeing what you would do if you were desperate.”

Learn more about Sherrill Roland and view his work on his website. Find his work Boneyard on the second floor of the Gibbes Museum. Visit gibbesmuseum.org for more info.