Sherrill Roland Correctional Identification Numbers Portraits Humanize The Wrongfully Incarcerated 

(Published in Forbes, 11/26/2024, by Chadd Scott)

Wrongfully convicted and then exonerated of a crime himself, Sherrill Roland gives “face” to those falsely imprisoned through portraits incorporating their correctional identification numbers.

The truth shall set you free.

Unless you’re Sherrill Roland (b. 1984; Asheville, N.C.). He was charged, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit.

Accurate statistics for false imprisonment in America don’t exist–can’t exist– but with a total incarcerated population close to 2,000,000, and considering the nation’s history of falsely imprisoning people, a safe estimate for those suffering from that condition would seemingly begin in the thousands.

Roland’s ordeal began in 2012. At the time he was in graduate school studying art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Out of nowhere, Roland was issued a warrant from Washington D.C. informing him that he had four felony counts against him pending indictment.

“When I went up there for the arraignment, there were two things at play: what I expected it to be you can call it naivety–and then what it really was,” Roland told Forbes.com. “I show up with the understanding that I didn’t do a thing, so therefore, my truth should be all I need. When I got (to D.C.), I go to a (police) precinct to meet a detective, and immediately they were like, ‘Step into this room, remove your belt, remove your shoestrings, place your belongings in this bag.’ Here’s handcuffs, here’s a jail cell. Steel bed. No mattress. Alone.”

He was guilty already.

America brags about the humanity a presumption of innocence its legal system is supposedly based on provides. Ask anyone who’s gone through the system without the benefit of highly paid lawyers and they’ll tell you, the accused start from behind. Sometimes, way behind.

“Then I get taken to a room, get interrogated, and then I go to court,” Roland continued. “I hop in a paddy wagon van and go to Pennsylvania Avenue. I’m shackled from wrist to ankles waiting for my arraignment. This is all before 8:00 AM. Then I have to wait till my name is called and be seen by a judge. At this point, I’m wondering ‘How am I going to court? I have no lawyer.’”

Roland was eventually provided with a court-appointed lawyer, meeting the attorney minutes before seeing the judge. After the arraignment, the lawyer convinced the judge to let Roland return to North Carolina. The court didn’t even know the accused lived outside the District.

What came next feels pulled from a movie.

“They let me go outside of Pennsylvania Avenue. I don’t know how I got there. There were no windows in the van,” Roland remembers. “I have no shoestrings. I have no tie, no belt. I don’t have my cell phone or wallet because all that is in the precinct.”

Chewed up and spit out.

“My court appointed lawyer lent me $20 to catch a cab back to the precinct so I could get my belongings and then I had to catch a flight back to North Carolina that evening,” he said.

Sherrill now realized he would need more than his truth to escape these erroneous charges.

“I surrendered myself with the truth and I was immediately taken advantage of in a way,” he continued. “They took me through the whole gamut without me having any authority over myself and then just left me. Nobody was there to care for me. Nobody cared how I got back to that precinct or gave me instructions (about what to do next). The system got me. I was left going back to North Carolina like, ‘What did I just go through?’”

What he went through was America’s so-called “criminal justice” system, but “criminal punishment” is a better description. The entirety of it, from the cops to the laws to the prosecutors to the judges to the jails, is designed for punishment, not justice.

As disadvantaged as Roland was navigating this system, imagine trying to do so as someone who doesn’t speak English, who’s elderly, who has a physical or mental handicap, someone who’s indigent, someone who simultaneously has children or a sibling or parents to care for.

Roland was an intelligent, healthy young man with a college degree and the support of his family, and this is how he was treated

Wrongly Convicted

At Roland’s trial, there were no witnesses. No evidence. It was his word against the District’s.

His greatest obstacle, however, proved to be his identity.

“What I (came) to recognize is that the first battle I was contending with, because there was no real evidence to convict, it was my body in that courtroom, and how often does my body–African American male in the District of Columbia–those conviction rates are extremely high,” Roland said.

The court needed a pound of flesh, it didn’t matter whose flesh, and the court got it from Roland, a young, Black, man. Close enough.

“To my naive mind, it’s not like TV. I didn’t have a whole day trial for myself. It was in a bench trial,” Roland said. “I was in a queue. There were people right before me getting their name called and after me. I saw the same judge go through a number of different motions and situations before my name got called, and then when I got called, (the judge) just looked to a detective and was like, ‘In your expert point of view, how often is this case right or wrong?’ And (the detective) was like, ‘We got high numbers.’ And (the judge) was like, ‘That’s all I need to know.’”

Wham bam thank you ma’am.

Roland experienced a bench trial–no jury–the American legal system’s version of a fast-food drive through. Roland doesn’t share the charges he was accused of, but the felonies were reduced to misdemeanors subjecting his case to this adjudication.

In a sadistic irony, because Roland’s trial didn’t include any evidence, there was nothing to appeal after he was found guilty.

Prison Art

On the inside, Roland benefitted from the support of family and friends who continued campaigning for his innocence.

“I had friends and loved ones write me letters and there were other guys that I was housed with who would see that type of participation from the outside world and were like, ‘You might just be alright,’” Roland remembers. “They would tell me stories, the longer the time gets, people get busy. Those letters decrease over time.”

His support network encouraged him to continue making art. He was sent copies of “Art Forum” magazine, the highfalutin international fine art world’s monthly publication.

“It has a type of high art that has no real context inside that specific space I was at,” Roland said of “Art Forum’s” place behind bars.

For artmaking, inmates were allowed access to little golf pencils with no erasers. Roland and his fellow prisoners did the best they could.

“I spent the most time in there were other guys who were drawing out of need,” he said. “They would draw and sell their drawings. I didn’t want to be a competitor. I wanted the least adverse time, so if someone needed something, I would mostly draw out of charity. If your daughter needed a birthday card, I would whip something up for you.”

His perception of art–it’s purpose, value, the making of it–naturally, changed dramatically.

“It made me question why I was even in grad school doing art anyways. That shift of necessity and what art was really used for inside that context of jail just completely flipped my value structure on a lot of things,” Roland said. “It was an overarching, whole Earth turning situation. It’s still those experiences I keep to maintain the integrity of work I make outside of jail about jail.

Correctional Identification Number

Between 2013 and 2014, Roland served 10 months in state prison, his full sentence. Once released, he was not allowed to leave D.C., serving six months of probation there. Between the pretrial period and his post-conviction probation, he lost control over his life for more than three years.

His case was picked up by Schertler, Onorato, Mead, & Sears, a D.C. law firm. It uncovered facts and details that had been left out of Roland’s trial. With new evidence–actual evidence–presented, Roland received a new trial. Two weeks before that retrial, the other side forfeited the case. The charges Roland’s life were destroyed over were such trash, the attorneys tasked to defend them didn’t even bother showing up to try.

America’s criminal punishment system did its job. Someone was punished. That it was an innocent man didn’t matter. Roland was exonerated in 2015 and his record cleared, but as for the prime years of his life lost, tough nuggets.

Upon entering the system, inmates are given Federal and State Correctional Identification Numbers. These numbers reduce people to a series of digits. In a new body of work on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C., Roland has transformed these ID numbers from wrongfully incarcerated individuals in North Carolina into numeric portraits–people as represented by numbers. Roland researched the cases of other wrongfully convicted individuals through conversations at Duke’s Wilson Center for Science and Justice. The project and exhibition were produced as a Mellon supported FHI Social Practice Lab Fellowship

Refuting the dehumanizing and anonymizing aspects of this system, Roland uses these digits to generate number-based artworks that follow specific rules, like sudoku puzzles.

“I do my best to forget it,” Roland said of his ID number.

He remembers. His family members do too.

On the inside, you’re not Sherrill Roland. When family and friends inquire about a visit or your case, they don’t ask for or about Sherrill Roland. They refer to your number.

We’re all 1s and 0s in a digital age, but these identification numbers are something else. Analog. A throwback. These numbers don’t digitize for fast sorting by computers, they dehumanize for slow sorting by people. Sorting of people. They’re designed to reduce. To warehouse

They’re designed by a criminal punishment system with a similar mission of dehumanizing, reducing, warehousing.

“My intention is to show the softness of the human being, to get a warmth out of the human being–there’s a human being attached to this (number)–but then also trying to highlight the coldness and harshness of the system,” Roland explained. “I’ve had people interact with this work and ask me, ‘I want to know about this person.’ I’m glad people feel that way. I’m glad they have a response to make them want to care for the person because you are reacting to the coldness of a system reducing a human being in this work.”

Sometimes Roland reveals the individual represented by the scrambled numbers, sometimes not. The titles of works include the number of days that each person was wrongfully imprisoned.

“Processing Systems” will be on view at the Nasher Museum through January 12, 2025.

On view concurrently is a complementary installation curated by Roland featuring selections from the Nasher Museum’s permanent collection depicting prison architecture and the criminal justice system throughout history.

A related installation, Processing Systems: Bonding by Sherrill Roland, is on view at the Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill until July 13, 2025.

Posted: November 27, 2024

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He was wrongfully incarcerated in 2013. Today, his art hangs in Triangle art museums. 

(Published in The News & Observer, 10/31/2024, by Lexi Solomon)

Read the full story here: He was wrongfully incarcerated in 2013. Today, his art hangs in Triangle art museums.

Posted: November 1, 2024

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Portrait of the Artist as a Wrongfully Incarcerated Individual 

(Published in INDY Week, 10/17/2024, by Justin Laidlaw) Two local exhibitions by artist Sherrill Roland, who was wrongfully incarcerated in 2013, contend with identity, portraiture, and the American criminal justice system.

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.”

Posted: October 31, 2024

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Community Closet: A Celebration of Black Fashion

Recent graduate, Sydney Reede, utilized her final semester at Duke to showcase her passion for the impact fashion has on society by creating and producing Community Closet, a celebration of fashion as a form of power and tool of resistance for Black people. Inspired by the publication Black Fashion Fair, Sydney began the project by creating a fashion magazine intended to “push for the success and discovery of up-and-coming Black-owned brands.” Sydney collaborated with the brands to include their clothing in the magazine, recruited models, styled photo shoots, and designed and created the magazine itself. 

Sydney was encouraged by her advisors to take Community Closet a step further, and organized a fashion show featuring fifteen Black-owned brands and local student designs. She coordinated the entire show herself from reserving the space and equipment for the show, to holding a model call and coordinating model selections with the brands, to organizing and running the rehearsals with the models and emcees.

Community Closet culminated into a two-day event including an exhibit and reception featuring the magazine on April 19, and a fashion show at the Bryan Center Plaza on April 20. Both the reception and fashion show were well attended by the Duke and greater Durham community. “It truly felt like a community event and showed how fashion can bring people together,” Sydney reflected. 

Sydney shared that projects like Community Closet are important to show how Black fashion has evolved throughout history in response to Black experiences: “Fashion gives Black people the opportunity to assert our presence in life and reclaim our agency and freedom through clothing.”

Post-graduation, Sydney hopes to expand upon her experience creating Community Closet as she embarks on an internship with Sandrine Charles Consulting, which is a creative agency and public relations firm for culturally-rooted fashion and lifestyle brands. She is excited to shadow those involved in the event planning and public relations industry, and hopes to potentially have her own creative agency someday. 

Community Closet was co-sponsored by the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminism, and the Franklin Humanities Institute Social Practice Lab and Artistic Research Initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Posted: May 23, 2023