Awardee Events

Sherrill Roland: The Turning Away From

Through July 31, 2025

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 W 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

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Sherrill Roland, 168.830, 2025. Steel, Kool-Aid, Resin. 25 x 25 x 1/2 inches; 63.5 x 63.5 x 1.3 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

Sherrill Roland (2021 Awardee) explores the impossible conditions and harsh aesthetics employed in the American criminal justice system. The Turning Away From presents new bodies of work that grapple with the extremes of life ‘inside’: the push and pull between intimacy and claustrophobia, comfort and violence, individuality and belonging, dissociation and distress. Drawing on his own experience of a wrongful conviction that was later overturned, Roland illuminates the lasting burdens and effects of incarceration.

Sherrill Roland

The Jumpsuit Project(s)

An African American man, wearing green baseball cap, black sweatshirt and black pants leaning on white steel I-beam pillar. Behind him is the corner of a studio, with the left wall expose brick and the perpendicular right wall painted white. A cinder block, plywood and wooden frames are laid on the floor and along the wall. Sherrill Roland is an interdisciplinary artist who creates art that challenges ideas around controversial social and political constructs, and generates a safe space to process, question, and share.

An African American man, wearing green baseball cap, black sweatshirt and black pants leaning on white steel I-beam pillar. Behind him is the corner of a studio, with the left wall expose brick and the perpendicular right wall painted white. A cinder block, plywood and wooden frames are laid on the floor and along the wall.