Terron Cooper Sorrells
Terron Cooper Sorrells, The Mandingo, 2025. Oil on canvas, 84 × 72 × 2 in | 213.4 × 182.9 × 5.1 cm
Commodity, Spectacle, and the Black Body
Terron Cooper Sorrells’s work occupies a charged space at the intersection of art history, race, and economics. His canvases are neither passive reflections nor abstract meditations; they are direct interventions in the ways Blackness has been historically imaged, consumed, and circulated. This painting demonstrates his command of Western visual traditions—appropriating their forms while simultaneously weaponizing them to narrate the endurance of the Black body exploited as commodity.
At the core of this work lies the stark dissection of the figure’s hand, immediately evoking Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875). Eakins sanctified the white male body as the locus of medical progress, elevating the surgeon to heroic status. Sorrells reconfigures this clinical violence, mapping it onto the Black body, whose dismemberment signals not progress but continued commodification in modern form. The medical theatre is transposed into an auction block; the body is rendered not as subject but as specimen. Through this gesture, Sorrells reminds us that the legacies of scientific racism and slavery continue within modern structures of power.
Image Reference: Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875). Eakins’s clinical realism sanctifies medicine; Sorrells reappropriates its visual grammar to indict systemic violence.
Surrounding the figure, headless white-suited forms stage the drama of institutional anonymity. They could be doctors, businessmen, politicians, collectors—faceless representatives of systemic power. Their very lack of individuality underlines the persistence of bureaucracy in commodifying bodies. The boardroom, courtroom, and hospital collapse into one indistinguishable site where value is extracted and humanity reduced.
Sorrells’s symbolic lexicon is equally incisive in its invocation of Pop idioms. The boxing glove, rendered unmistakably as a Mickey Mouse hand, operates on several registers. It is a caustic critique of the spectacle industries that have historically relied on Black physicality for entertainment—boxing, sports, music—while stripping away the dignity of the individual. The Mickey Mouse glove ironizes this, collapsing violence into cartoonish play, exposing how mass culture has trivialized Black suffering into consumable spectacle.
Image Reference: Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat famous promotional boxing photograph, and even Black struggle and resistance (boxing as a Black cultural symbol) is trivialized, packaged, and turned into spectacle. Mickey Mouse gloves make the fight appear like entertainment rather than survival.
Other elements reinforce this reading: the microphone, symbol of agency and voice, appears muted, displaced. The hammer, once an emblem of labor and creation, is rendered inert. Together, these objects stage the neutralization of Black agency, where tools of empowerment are absorbed back into the machinery of commodification.
The painting’s power lies in its narrative clarity. Sorrells resists the temptation of abstraction for its own sake, choosing instead to assert a story with specificity: the Black man is still being used as a commodity. In this way, his work diverges from the allegorical ambiguities of postmodernism. He insists on a direct truth telling or confrontation depending on your point of view, implicating viewers in the persistence of systemic violence.
Yet this indictment is not without resistance. The central figure, though dissected and encircled, does not vanish. His presence persists, composed and undeniable, refusing the erasure scripted for him. In this, Sorrells stages a counter-gesture: endurance as defiance. The work becomes not merely diagnostic but accusatory, demanding that viewers recognize both the structures of violence and the resilience of those subjected to them.
Context and Lineage
Sorrells belongs to a lineage of artists who have repurposed Western art history to interrogate race, power, and representation. Like Kerry James Marshall, he insists on the centrality of Black figures in spaces that art history has traditionally denied them. Like David Hammons, he manipulates cultural symbols to expose the absurdity of commodification. Like Glenn Ligon, he engages with language—visual and textual—as a site where meaning and power collide.
Image Reference: David Hammons, How Ya Like Me Now? (1988). A satirical confrontation with racial caricature, paralleling Sorrells’s critique of spectacle.
Image Reference: Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio) (2014). Marshall reclaims the Black body in art-historical space; Sorrells does so through direct confrontation with commodification.
Image Reference: Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background). Ligon’s conceptual framing of race and power resonates with Sorrells’s insistence on clarity of narrative.
However, Sorrells diverges from these predecessors in his surgical clarity. Where Marshall often constructs lush, utopian counter-histories, Sorrells presents the brutality of the present with unflinching precision. Where Hammons revels in sly irony, Sorrells opts for direct confrontation. His work is less about irony than accusation, less about absence than presence.
This painting, in particular, reveals Sorrells deep knowledge of Western canonical forms—not as a source of admiration but as raw material for critique. By evoking The Gross Clinic or appropriating Pop Art’s cartoonish vernacular, he positions himself within the tradition only to fracture it from within. The result is a double gesture: mastery of the canon and its simultaneous undoing.
Implications
To read Sorrells is to be reminded that art remains entangled in systems of value, spectacle, and power. His insistence on the Black body as both subject and commodity exposes the unfinished business of emancipation, the ways in which history continues to script the present. His work demands that institutions, collectors, and audiences confront their complicity in these systems.
Ultimately, the brilliance of Sorrells lies not only in his painterly skill or his command of art history, but in his capacity to transform these into a weapon of narrative clarity. His message is not diluted by abstraction, nor softened by irony. It cuts with precision: the Black body remains commodified, but its endurance resists erasure. The painting is, therefore, not just an image but a demand—an insistence that we reckon with what persists beneath the surface of history and culture.
“In what seems to be other worlds painted in vivid colors and intricate details, I invite my viewers into the neglected narratives of African American history, life, and culture. In my practice of painting and printmaking, I create large-scale works that envelop viewers in stories of the everyday interwoven with allusions to the past. My work becomes a collective portrait of what it means to be African American today in a celebration of its rich, diverse, and beautiful nature.
Within each piece, I dissect the way we perceive African American culture today. In an investigation into race and the legacy of slavery, I use my work to challenge the day-to-day perceptions, the way our history is written, and how we chronicle art history in regard to the black experience. Through a confluence of mythological, religious, and iconic historical imagery I construct a new visual language that can be engaged as a tool to unearth the forgotten, overlooked, and blatantly ignored narratives of African Americans since before the birth of the nation. However, my final images, while raw and vulnerable, do not radiate with pain and trauma that has been intergenerationally embodied, but the strong and resilient spirit of our people.
My work simultaneously acknowledges the traumas of our past while unveiling the vibrancy of the culture that has formed in its wake. The dramatic and intense scenes I depict speak to instilling a new sense of empathy as viewers connect to the stories unfolding before them, an act that works to combat the ongoing whitewashing of histories. Each painting and print become a window into the overlooked facets of our society that exist alongside us.” Artist Statement from Richard Beavers Gallery
Terron Cooper Sorrells (b. 1994, Virginia) is a painter and printmaker whose work examines the African American cultural and historical experience through narrative storytelling. Balancing realism and abstraction, his monumental canvases explore themes of family, music, segregation, and the cycles of inherited trauma, portraying both the pain and the beauty of daily life. Influenced by Rembrandt, Picasso, and Kerry James Marshall, Sorrells employs a cool palette and a compositional precision that reflects his self-described pursuit of harmony. His work has been exhibited nationally, including with Richard Beavers Gallery (New York), Steve Turner (Los Angeles), and Kavi Gupta (Chicago). A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Sorrells lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Richard Beavers Gallery.