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?
