Sherrill Roland
September 10 – November 2, 2019
The Jumpsuit Project Performances:
Tuesday, September 10, 3 – 4 PM
Wednesday, October 2, 5 – 7PM
Sherrill Roland Exhibition Handout
Inertia looks at the varying social and political issues surrounding incarceration, through the lens of Sherrill Roland’s own experience with the justice system. Falsely accused and convicted of a crime, Roland served ten months at the Central Detention Facility in Washington, DC. Although he was eventually exonerated, the experience changed him profoundly and led him to re-think his relationship to making art. Out of that experience Roland developed The Jumpsuit Project, an ongoing social practice work in which he engages visitors in conversations about incarceration, generating safe spaces to process, question, and discuss aspects of justice involvement. Through The Jumpsuit Project and other related works, he further encourages viewers to address their own prejudices towards those who are or have been incarcerated.
Sherrill Roland was born in Asheville, NC, and received both his BFA in Design and MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has shared the The Jumpsuit Project around the country through speaking and performance engagements at numerous institutions, including Georgetown University, the University of Michigan Law School, and Princeton University. His work has been exhibited most recently at ARTSpace Raleigh; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; LACE: Los Angeles; and the Studio Museum of Harlem. He was recently awarded the Post-MFA Fellowship in the Documentary Arts at the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University in Durham, NC.