COLLECTIVE WITNESS

Collective Witness brings together artists Sheryl Oring and  Sherrill Roland, whose work reflects on democracy, justice, and freedom. Presented by SE CLT Gallery as part of the national Fall of Freedom initiative, this exhibition stands as a testament to the power of art to bear witness and to imagine an equitable future.

Through works that are both intimate and public, Oring and Roland transform lived experience and individual testimony into works that urge an engaged citizenry to imagine its way toward true freedom. 

In different ways, Oring and Roland make visible the marks that power leaves behind. Oring’s work arises from an ongoing dialogue with the public sphere. Roland’s emerges from the personal experience of confinement. What binds them is a shared insistence on presence, and the belief that to be seen, remembered, and recorded is itself an act of freedom.

Sheryl Oring’s landmark I Wish to Say project evinces how civic participation becomes art. Since 2004, Oring has set up a traveling public office - complete with a manual typewriter - and invited members of the public to dictate postcards to the U.S. president. Each message is typed verbatim, creating an authentic record of the participant’s voice. The original postcard is given to the participant to mail to the White House, while Oring preserves a carbon copy for her archive. Over the past two decades, she has typed nearly 5,200 postcards in nearly 200 locations across the United States. The project has been supported by the Creative Capital Foundation, Franklin Furnace Fund, North Carolina Arts Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Philadelphia Foundation. Oring is the editor of Activating Democracy: The “I Wish to Say” Project (Intellect Books, 2016) and a contributor to Secretary to the People: Civic Engagement Through the Art of Sheryl Oring edited by Corey Dzenko, (forthcoming in 2026, Intellect Books).

The monoprints presented in this exhibition grow directly from the I Wish to Say performances. Using a Xerox transfer process - a painstaking method in which typewritten texts are manually burnished and layered to transfer toner onto paper - Oring transforms the ephemeral messages collected in public spaces into enduring visual statements. Fragments of citizens’ words - pleas, protests, hopes, and demands - reappear as ghostly traces and overlapping forms, their imperfections reflecting the complexity of democratic expression. The resulting prints blur the boundaries between document and artwork, capturing both the intimacy of individual speech and the collective spirit of civic dialogue. Prints from this series have been displayed at The Free Library of Philadelphia (2025); the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia (2025); and will be featured in the exhibition America 250: Common Threads at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2026. 

Sherrill Roland’s interdisciplinary practice examines the complex intersections of identity, justice, and memory through the lens of personal and collective experience. Drawing from his wrongful incarceration, Roland transforms the visual and material language of the American criminal legal system into meditations on truth, personhood, and resilience. His work reconfigures objects, numbers, and materials associated with confinement — from correctional ID codes and cinder blocks to Kool-Aid and commissary goods — into sculptural and conceptual forms that question how systems of power define, contain, and erase the individual.

Roland gained national recognition for his 2016 performance work The Jumpsuit Project. The moving performance involved wearing an orange jail jumpsuit daily on campus, encouraging all who encountered him and his jumpsuit to address their own prejudices toward those incarcerated. The New York Times included Roland in their list “From the Personal to the Political, 19 Artists to Watch Next Year,” and in 2018 The Studio Museum in Harlem exhibited his The Jumpsuit Project, which they acquired for their permanent collection

Roland is the recipient of the USA Fellowship (2024), Gibbes Museum of Art’s 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art (2023); Creative Capital Award (2021); South Arts Southern Grand Prize & State Fellowship (2020); and was an Art for Justice Grantee (2020) in addition to many other awards and recognitions. He has had fellowships and residencies at Fountainhead, Miami; Duke University, Durham, NC; Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA, and the McColl Center.