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?