Terron Sorrells' prints with a purpose

Ann Shafer

One of the best things about teaching art students is that they move on and you get to watch as they continue to blossom. I’m not in touch with all of the students who wandered through my print room, but there are a special few with whom I keep in touch and follow on the interwebs. Once such artist is Terron Sorrells, who was in Tru Ludwig’s History of Prints class in 2014, during his junior year at MICA. Tru brought classes to the BMA six times over the semester and we looked at eighty to one hundred prints per visit from Master E.S. to yesterday. (There’s just no substitute for seeing prints in person.) Tru and I taught those classes thirteen times from fall 2005 to spring 2017. During the fall 2014 class, Terron was always as close to the prints as possible with a magnifying glass in hand, clearly soaking in their history, intricacies, and beauty.
 
The final project in History of Prints was the creation of a work using two or three prints the students had seen during the semester as jumping-off points. Sometimes non-printmaking students would produce a project in a different medium but mostly they produced prints. We saw a tapestry, a handful of drawings, a video work using Kathe Kollwitz’s Raped as its influence, and a website playing with the notion of the limited edition (when you set the number in the edition, after viewing the webpage that number of times, it would no longer load). We saw some really great prints and a whole lot of meh prints. I always noted to myself which work was that class’s winner. Terron’s print, Handouts, was the winner in the fall 2014 class.
 
Terron’s prints from his years at MICA seem particularly relevant today as we’ve just come off a weekend full of demonstrations, some peaceful and some violent, protesting the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. There is a through-line that winds its way from slavery through Reconstruction-era inmate leasing, Jim Crow laws of segregation, racial terror lynchings, mass incarceration, and today’s police killings. The terms may have changed, but the effect remains. Visual acts of protest in prints can be indelible markers of those moments in history, and some can remain eerily relevant even years later.
 
Terron had his first one-person exhibition in 2019 at Strathmore Hall in Bethesda, Maryland, and it was beautiful. It was great to see Terron’s more recent paintings hanging alongside the prints from his school years. Many of the works on view had red dots marking them as sold, and additional impressions of some of the prints were available in Strathmore’s shop, because, ya know, prints are multiples. While many people take issue with that multiplicity, printmakers have long been drawn to making images in numbers that enable images to be spread far and wide. Sometimes prints are made to extend an artist’s fame or a particular composition; sometimes prints are made to make a very pointed statement about society. Prescient political prints have been produced by the likes of Jacques Callot, Francisco de Goya, Edouard Manet, Honoré Daumier, Otto Dix, Pablo Picasso, Leonard Baskin, Sue Coe, Sandow Birk, and countless others. To this list we can add Terron Sorrells.
 
Terron’s prints often turn history on its ear. In Triumph over Kasualties, African Americans wearing whiteface swoop into a Klan rally on horseback upending the narrative. This is the most active act of resistance in this group of prints. The rest highlight somewhat quieter but no less impactful moments. In Colored Only the split frame reveals that life only exists in color on the colored side. In After That, Do This, Then This, Then That, a multi-appendaged domestic worker is keeping the household running as the white woman boops her on the nose. The shadow of her head is reminiscent of a figure in Pablo Picasso's monumental and monumentally important painting, Guernica. In Handouts, Cooper has crossed out the identifying label “negro” to remind viewers that there are individuals behind labels. These prints are pointed, beautifully executed, and quiet, but they pack a wallop. While I really like Terron’s new paintings, I hope that someday he will return to printmaking, for his is a strong voice that is needed now more than ever.
 
Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994)
Handouts, 2014
Etching 
279 x 356 mm. (11 x 14 in.) 
 
Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994)
Gumptious Stroll Through Stagville Estate, 2014
Etching
279 x 330 mm. (11 x 13 in.) 
 
Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994)
Triumph over Kasualties, 2015
Etching
356 x 508 mm. (14 x 20 in.) 
 
Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994)
Press Forward, 2015
Etching with chine collé
127 x 178 mm. (5 x 7 in.)
 
Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994)
Picket, 2015
Etching with chine collé
279 x 381 mm. (11 X 15 in.)
 
Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994)
Colored Only, 2016
Lithograph with chine collé
381 x 533 mm. (15 x 21 in.)
 
Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994)
After That, Do This, Then This, Then That, 2016
Lithograph
381 x 533 mm. (15 x 21 in.)
 
Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994)
Black Lives Matter, 2016
Monotype
444 x 508 mm. (17 ½ x 20 in.)

Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994), Handouts, 2014, etching, 279 x 356 mm. (11 x 14 in.)

Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994), Press Forward, 2015, etching with chine collé, 127 x 178 mm. (5 x 7 in.)

Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994), Gumptious Stroll Through Stagville Estate, 2014, etching, 279 x 330 mm. (11 x 13 in.)

Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994), Picket, 2015, etching with chine collé, 279 x 381 mm. (11 X 15 in.)

Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994), Colored Only, 2016, lithograph with chine collé, 381 x 533 mm. (15 x 21 in.)

Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994), After That, Do This, Then This, Then That, 2016, lithograph, 381 x 533 mm. (15 x 21 in.)

Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994), Triumph over Kasualties, 2015, etching, 356 x 508 mm. (14 x 20 in.)

Terron Sorrells (American, born 1994), Black Lives Matter, 2016, monotype, 444 x 508 mm. (17 ½ x 20 in.)