Beyond the Frame: Art as Reckoning and Reimagination
Duke faculty memver Pedro Lasch and UNC faculty member Sherrill Roland’s artistic collaborations ask: How does art reclaim our humanity? After spending ten months in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and for which he was exonerated, Roland returned to his art practice not just to heal, but to challenge. Through a fellowship with Lasch’s Social Practice Lab — which brings together scholars, artists, and activists — Roland created the exhibit “Processing Systems: Numbers,” a reckoning with how we see, name and remember those impacted by the criminal justice system. Lasch has spent nearly two decades using mirrors to interrogate the politics of perception and power. His ongoing series, Black Mirror / Espejo Negro, layers iconic European paintings with pre-Columbian sculptures onto darkened glass, letting the mirror reflect and challenge our views on their history. These two artists do not make art that just hangs on walls, but that asks us to reimagine the world in which we live.
“Sherrill's body of work, “Processing Systems: Numbers,” which debuted at the Nasher Museum, was produced entirely at Duke, illuminating the dynamic opportunities for art and technology partnerships across campus. The series itself —numerical portraits of individuals who have been exonerated in Durham in recent decades — is a meditation on time spent and lost in the prison system, powerfully raising the questions: how can museums like the Nasher amplify these stories and promote dialogue around the often-invisible consequences of incarceration? How can art serve in the pursuit of justice?”
- Julia McHugh, Trent A. Carmichael Director of Academic Initiatives and Curator of Arts of the Americas, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Full Transcript
Welcome to season two of Duets, a Duke Trinity podcast that explores research collaborations between faculty, students and community partners across Durham and North Carolina.
Today we’re joined by Duke faculty Pedro Lasch and UNC faculty Sherrill Roland, whose artistic collaborations ask: How does art reclaim our humanity? After spending ten months in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and for which he was exonerated, Roland returned to his art practice not just to heal, but to challenge. Through a fellowship with Lasch’s Social Practice Lab — which brings together scholars, artists, and activists — Roland created the exhibit “Processing Systems: Numbers,” a reckoning with how we see, name and remember those impacted by the criminal justice system. Lasch has spent nearly two decades using mirrors to interrogate the politics of perception and power. His ongoing series, “Black Mirror / Espejo Negro,” layers iconic European paintings with pre-Columbian sculptures onto darkened glass, letting the mirror reflect and challenge our views on their history. These two artists do not make art that just hangs on walls, but that asks us to reimagine the world in which we live.
Pedro: Hi, I'm Pedro Lasch, and I'm an artist and a professor at Duke University.
Sherill: My name is Sherrill Roland. I am an assistant professor of sculpture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Pedro: Sherill, how is collaboration important for your work and the work we've done together?
Sherill: It wouldn't have been as successful had it not been for our collaborative effort, and that's at every stage of the process of making it, whether it be the research part of it, connecting community members with the conceptual ideas, and then also in the production stage of making this work come to life. That collaboration was definitely monumental in facilitating bringing them to life — in a physical sense — for this show.
I'm specifically interested about this fellowship that you have, not only me being one of the many fellows, but you being a facilitator in this position that I hope to maybe one day become. You have a studio practice of your own, but now you're also facilitating. And what does that look like for you in collaboration in your work?
Pedro: Well, be careful what you ask for. No, I mean, I've always enjoyed every minute of facilitating and helping other artists produce their work and think of things that they haven't been able to do, and help them make them — so that part has always been a joy. The only catch is that, of course, it takes the time away from your art making. But the way I kind of ended up arriving in that situation was because there were other responsibilities already in the full-time teaching job at a research university, which included all kinds of committees and bureaucracy and so on. And at one point — this is already, like, 20 years ago at Duke — I realized a lot of people were organizing conferences. That was kind of the default mode of the university. Let's invite people, we all talk and talk and talk, and then we talk some more, and then maybe, if we're lucky, we publish something, right? And I was like, as an artist, this is just terribly boring, like we have so many skills, and not only that, but at our university, there's people who make robots, there's people who do research that actually engages socially with people — and why are we only doing conferences? I mean, I love a good conference, don't get me wrong, you know. And so, I started getting better and better at getting resources together so that we could still invite people, but instead of just talking, we could make things. We could do stuff. We could stage interventions, you know? And so I had like 10-15 years of practice doing that already, before I got my first support, initially from Duke. It's how I've learned to make a balance of it. I think it's an important time to speak of how important universities are to support our type of practice. We are artists who do research. We're artists who connect with social groups that have been excluded from art. And the art market is not enough to support artists like us, and so it's by having these jobs at universities where that is part of our job, right, to talk about art, to write about it, to invite people for conferences, for events.
And so how has that been, teaching, you know, as a full-time professor, while also maintaining your very, very active production career?
Sherill: To have the opportunity to connect with students, grad students and undergraduate, that's always really nice. It's like another form of collaboration in a way of like smaller projects at the very early stages of folks who are re-establishing a youthful connection to art, like returning to it in a classwork setting, is like: “I used to do it, I'm curious about it.” These very early stages of creating is really interesting to me, even with the stage when I'm at my career. So, those opportunities have been really fruitful to kind of, like, reconnect things simply, to have new eyes again with materials and play. But the balance with my studio practice and everything that is required of a full-time faculty member has been a bit of a challenge.
Pedro: And parenting.
Sherill: And parenting. Absolutely, absolutely. And I've had a few shows this academic calendar, and I think I'm learning how to — juggle may not be the right word — but just kind of like pace. Good pace. Pace for everything.
Pedro: Is there something that you feel people consistently misunderstand about your work?
Sherill: That's a great question. I mean, for the feedback sometimes, yes. I think my approach to making work — particularly that body of work, of abstract portraitures made of Federal Correctional ID numbers — was that the pathway of liberating the individual, or showing the humanity of the individual I'm using, isn't the one-to-one approach of normal, expected portraiture, in ways you can exhibit a person in the best attributes, even dreamy attributes. It was definitely the reverse direction, of reduction, taking away all of those possibilities, only to then leave that upon the viewer of discovering it in their imagination. And I think some of those questionings, you know, was new to me. It's like, you know ‘Have you ever thought of putting them this way?” And I was like, yeah, but that's not the direction I'm taking.
What I'm learning is how to deal with, not only normal things, of putting work out into a community sphere, like introducing it to the world, but then also, you know, what's to come with some of these conversations I'm having. These kind of nuanced conversations about how people are being represented within the carceral system, and using these examples of reduction by the carceral system as a way of making. And that's not always the most beautiful approach. And that's been really interesting to me, of like a form of engagement — artwork as a vehicle or a spark to start conversations. It's not necessarily what I would prefer esthetically, I fight myself, esthetically, about what my work should look like, and ultimately what it ends up being is more important than what I might want to dress it up to be.
Pedro: I think that's really interesting, because so many of us have to deal with that, right? When we want to deal with social topics, you know, or challenging situations or emotions, like, people forget that minimalism itself, which you often riff on, was born in the context of the Vietnam War, and a lot of these artists saw it as a refusal. So, this idea of deliberately refusing esthetic options that you're capable of, you know? Like, audience members often think that if we present something in a minimalist way, we don't know how to do it otherwise, which is, of course, false. Many of us have an art education that lets us do things in different ways.
Sherill: You know, we've been having conversations, speaking within the last five years, which you know, the world has changed a good bit, but then, the landscape of working within this field. How has it changed?
Pedro: For me, it's been amazing to see how in the last two decades, there's so many amazing artists of color being exhibited, collected — and not just in the US, but internationally, right? 20 or 30 years ago, when I was looking for role models as a Mexican-American artist, it just, it's incomparable. So, what's exciting to me is not just to see the effervescence within particular communities of art makers — which in many ways, was already there and it pre-existed — but the effervescence being matched with recognition, because that matters, you know? Because it makes a young artist who signs up for your class feel like, “yeah, I can make it.” And I needed role models like that, you know, as someone who had to wait tables, move furniture, do all these jobs. And for me, it was someone like Hans Haacke who made political art, who was my mentor. And through him, I could say, “yeah, you can make tough political art and still make a living.” And so, I think having these role models and seeing that they can live a decent life is crucial, and that has been a very positive development.
Can you tell us about a time when your art making or the research you do for it made you hopeful?
Sherill: What your fellowship presented me to do was get a haunting idea out into the world, and that pursuit ended up opening cross-disciplinary opportunities, and I got to engage with mathematicians, data scientists... that type of thing I feel very hopeful for, like, you know, things that I'm thinking about personally, but that art is the vehicle for that. Somehow art continues to take me places I never thought I could get to. And to kind of piggyback off of that, I ended up working with a former student of yours, Michael Betz, a graduate student of the MFA EDA program. He introduced me to a colleague of his who is on death row currently, and I ended up making a portrait for him. And the conversation between him and I was really important, and to have the courage and encouragement from somebody like that to present a portrait like mine — it's not a work that can represent him in totality, but — opened the door to bridge an outside connection to him in the current situation that he's in. So, for art to, again, be a portal into new spaces that I didn't think was possible and then spaces formally set up to where it's not possible to have connection, makes me very hopeful.
So right back at you, can you share a time when your artwork or research made you feel hopeful?
Pedro: Yeah, I mean, most recently, I did find a lot of hope in this installation in the Asheville Art Museum. First of all, the fact that it happened, because I've been working on this project almost 20 years, it’s been very challenging, and it finally happened. So, like it involves this huge piece of glass, nine by ten feet, very heavy –– how we even got it into the building required a lot of hope and perseverance. But also, it addresses the longer arc of history, of immigration, the complexity of our cultural existence, by bringing together this Aztec goddess Coatlicue and the famous painting by Velasquez “Las Meninas”. But it basically becomes this big, black mirror that people see themselves reflected in, so we all become part of the work. We are part of the meaning, you know? So, if you bring your family, you are part of the work. And if I see myself, I'm part of the work. Or if someone just happens to stumble into it, basically you bring your hope into the picture, you know? And we had a really great response, like Anthony Appiah, the ethicist, columnist from the New York Times, philosopher was there, along with many other great people responding to the work and in conversation directly about the topic of immigration, which is a topic that, mostly these days, produces vicious exchanges, you know? And we had a full museum of people happily engaging with art and talking about immigration, not in cookie-cutter, political ways, but in intelligent, but also deeply-felt ways. And so, I feel like it did bring me hope to what art can do and what we can do together with it.
Sherill: If you're interested in seeing any more of my work, Instagram or my website, it's probably the best place to kind of connect with me. My website is my name, SherillRoland.com and that's the same for my Instagram handle.
Pedro: If you want to learn more about what I do as an artist, you can go to PedroLasch.com that's L, A, S, C, H, and same on Instagram, it's @PedroLasch, one word. And for the social practice lab and the types of collaborations and fellowships we do, like with Sherill, you can look for Duke Social Practice Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute.
Duets is produced by Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.
Senior Editor and Producer: Cara August, Trinity Communications
Audio Editor and Mixer: Marc Maximov
Music Composition: André Mego, T’20 | MMS ‘21
Production Sponsor: Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke University
Recording Date and Location: May 2025, Bryan Center Studios
