Rooted: Terron Cooper Sorrells

Growing from centuries of resilience into the urgent soils of the present, Rooted is the culmination of a series of new works by Terron Cooper Sorrells, nourished by the deep strata of history, faith, and cultural inheritance. His practice has always been an excavation, a steady, deliberate uncovering of narratives left in the margins, but here, the

act of unearthing becomes an act of planting. Rooted is not only about origins; it is about continuance, about what survives, transforms, and flourishes despite the weight of erasure.

The title Rooted speaks to both origin and endurance. These works emerge from deep cultural and historical soil, nourished by ancestral memory yet branching into urgent contemporary narratives. Influenced by post-Renaissance and Baroque masters such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt, this exhibition channels their mastery of chiaroscuro, light

emerging from darkness, to illuminate the complex intersections of African American life, spirituality, and legacy. Across twelve paintings, Sorrells engages in a dialogue between the sacred and the secular, the monumental and the intimate, inviting viewers to

enter spaces of reflection, recognition, and reckoning.

At the heart of the exhibition are two monumental works that serve as thematic pillars. In his six-by-eight-foot deposition scene, Sorrells reimagines the descent of Christ from the cross. However, here, he is transposed into a present-day setting, a night scene full of chaos and turmoil reminiscent of a nightclub in a city like Atlanta. The central figure

bears not the spear wound of Calvary, but the bullet wound of modern American violence. Around him, figures strain in urgency, their gestures a choreography of care and desperation. This scene, bathed in dramatic light and shadow, collapses time, making the past’s sacred narratives inseparable from the present’s lived realities.

Its companion piece, “Reborn,” turns from death to renewal. In another grand tableau, robed figures lower a body into baptismal waters. The motion is inverse; here, the body descends not into a grave, but into the earth’s cleansing embrace. Sorrells positions these works as mirrors to each other: one bearing the weight of mortal violence, the other

embodying the possibility of spiritual restoration.

While these monumental canvases command from across the room, drawing viewers towards them with their towering presence, Rooted also compels viewers to move into intimate proximity. Several six-by-six-inch works require close looking, their small scale intensifying their emotional weight. In “Angel,” Sorrells renders a fetus-like subject with layered translucence, as if seen through the shimmering medium of amniotic fluid. The title shifts the language around the unborn, reframing debates of life, loss, and agency in deeply personal and cultural terms.

Throughout the exhibition, Sorrells incorporates biblical archetypes into contemporary Black narratives. A life-sized nude man and woman cannot help but evoke the tale of Adam and Eve. While they remain unnamed, they are instantly recognizable as they step forward from the classically depicted darkness, breaking free from their two-dimensional paradise into our reality, tinged with a sense of foreboding. The suggestion is not a fall from grace but an emergence into the world as it is: imperfect, fraught, and yet still full of possibility.

Yet Sorrells does not showcase theology in isolation. Faith, in Rooted, opposes being a static doctrine but instead emerges as an evolving language of imagery, gesture, and myth; active frameworks through which contemporary struggles and triumphs can be read. Sorrells’s interest lies in how spiritual symbolism intersects with the social, the political, and the intimate. He threads together the generational weight of inherited

trauma, the quiet persistence of cultural beauty, and the negotiations of identity within a society that often seeks to define it from the outside. Here, sacred and secular do not stand in opposition; they overlap, merge, and refract.

In bringing together large-scale dramas and intimate vignettes, Rooted asserts that both the epic and the everyday are worthy of reverence. While the exhibition feels somber at times, it is because Sorrells does not shy away from the weight of his subjects. He acknowledges the shadow side of cultural inheritance: the wounds carried forward and the systemic inequities reinforced across generations. But neither does he allow that

weight to crush the narrative. His works, while heavy with history, remain charged with vitality. They hold space for the possibility that renewal is not the erasure of struggle but its transformation into strength.

Resisting linear narratives, Sorrells allows Rooted to function as a living archive, honoring complexity, contradiction, and evolution. The works are not meant to be decoded into a single meaning; rather, they encourage a sustained engagement, a willingness to return and see differently over time. This is the generosity of his practice: he offers not definitive answers, but enduring questions.

Ultimately, Rooted reminds us that to be rooted is to be in relationship with our pasts, our communities, our faiths, and ourselves. It is to recognize the interconnectedness of what has been, what is, and what might yet be. Rooted is not an exhibition of passive observation; it is an act of participation. The work Sorrells creates positions the viewer as

witness and interlocutor, asking: What do we inherit from our histories, and what do we choose to carry forward?