Portrait of the Artist as a Wrongfully Incarcerated Individual

For the past decade, artist Sherrill Roland’s muse has been a painful past experience.

In 2012, Roland was pursuing an MFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro when he was arrested while visiting Washington, D.C. Roland was told that he had four warrants against him, pending indictment, and was wrongfully imprisoned for 10 months before the charges were dropped and he was exonerated. When he returned to Greensboro to finish his master’s degree, he donned an orange prison jumpsuit to draw attention to the inequities of the criminal justice system.

In the years since his release, Roland, a multimedia artist, has continued to wrestle with his experience and to invite others into the conversation through his craft.

His newest exhibition on display at the Nasher Museum of Art is called Processing Systems: Numbers. Pedro Lasch, director of Duke’s Social Practice Lab at the John H. Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Nasher’s Julia McHugh curated the exhibit.

In the middle of the exhibition room, a glass box sits on a long narrow platform. A detailed floor plan of the prison where Roland was held is on display. Two and three-dimensional shapes made from plexiglass and filled with bits of Kool-Aid, resembling pieces of a Tetris game, flank either side of the blueprint. For this exhibition, Roland limited his materials to things that were available in his prison environment; steel, aluminum, plexiglass, and even Kool-Aid. It’s a method he’s deployed in previous work.

Along the room’s walls are seven five-by-five panels in the style of the classic number game Sudoku. Hidden inside each Sudoku puzzle is a personal identification number belonging to a real-life inmate. Six represent people charged in Durham County before they, like Roland, were exonerated; the seventh represents Darryl Hunt, a Winston-Salem man whose story of wrongful incarceration was turned into an HBO documentary in 2006.

Each number sequence represents a name and a place of origin. Roland says the I.D. numbers are deliberately disguised inside the puzzles to mask the inmate’s identity—only they would be able to recognize their story inside what Roland describes as “a different form of portraiture.” 

“I wanted to be respectful of their lived experiences, of their time,” Roland says. “I have no idea what they’ve encountered in their time. I haven’t met these individuals, either, so I didn’t want to take advances without their permission.” 

“Even though I am using their numbers,” he continues, “it’s still scattered. Sudoku puzzles are never in sequential order, anyways. But if they were to come here, they would recognize their own numbers, kind of like they would recognize their own name.”

Roland has served as an artist-in-residence for the past year and a half through the Social Practice Lab. In 2023, the program was awarded a Mellon Foundation grant.  

“Sherrill was sort of the perfect person to have as one of these artists,” McHugh says, “because of the way research is a part of his work, but also, just because of his social engagement.”

As part of the residency, Roland has worked across campus at the Rubenstein Arts Center and DesignHub at Duke’s Innovation Co-Lab. The spaces gave Roland access to a suite of tools and materials—laser etching, 3D printers, saws, drills, steel, plastic; a craftsman’s playground— to bring his vision to life. The collaboration with Duke has afforded Roland the runway to think deeply about how to best express his work.

“It’s such a unique experience to have a longer-term relationship with an artist and to see them actually in the process of making because this is a totally new series,” McHugh says. 

Processing Systems: Numbers is on display at the Nasher until January 2025; a complimentary installation curated by Roland, featuring selections from the Nasher Museum’s permanent collection, is also on display. 

In Chapel Hill, Processing Systems: Bonding, a related exhibition by Roland, is also currently on view at the Ackland Art Museum through July 2025. 

Bonding is a precursor to Numbers at the Nasher and also explores portraiture through prison ID numbers, repurposing the sequences held by both Roland and his father, who passed away when he was four years old. Roland says he didn’t know much about his father—who was also named Sherrill—until he got into trouble as a minor and the courthouse looked up Roland’s name in the system. Instead, they pulled up his father’s record. 

“When it came up, they said, ‘This can’t be you,’” Roland remembers. “That was my first introduction to this version of him, in a way.”

In 2022, the Nasher acquired a piece of Roland’s art in 2022 to add to its collection. It was recently on display in the museum’s Love and Anarchy exhibition which ran from June 2023 to June 2024.

That piece, titled “With Heart, Letter,” features an acrylic glass lightbox with bright red LED lights that spell out excerpts of letters from loved ones that Roland received while in prison. Layering the letters on top of one another inside the lightbox allows Roland and his loved ones a level of anonymity that has become increasingly more precious after years of exposing his own story to the world.

“I didn’t know how to deal with it,” Sherrill says, “but it got to a point where, in layering the information… I was trying to think about how to protect some of this vulnerability.”

On October 2—a day sometimes recognized as Wrongful Convictions day— the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law released a report detailing the impact of wrongful convictions in North Carolina. 75 people have been exonerated in North Carolina since 1989, according to the report, losing a collective 963 total years to incarceration.

The criminal justice system has served as a common thread throughout Roland’s work. But with each new exhibition, he expands the scope of the conversation to incorporate other narratives, like Daryl Hunt, into his material to illustrate the systemic causes at the root of criminal justice reform. By introducing new stories into his work, Roland says he hopes that viewers will begin to arrive at their own questions about how justice is administered in the United States.

“That’s the best I could hope for,” Roland says of the questions he hopes viewers will ask. “I sat with this for a while, but I’m limited by my own experiences. But the thrill of it is once it’s given out to the public, they could take this all kinds of ways.”

Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on X or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].