CARROLL SOCKWELL

Last year, while wandering through the aisles of Blick art store, I found myself in one of those unexpected conversations that seem to materialize out of thin air. An artist, a stranger really, mentioned with genuine relief how fortunate he felt to have caught the art sale just in time—it was ending that very day. He turned to me with the easy familiarity artists often share and asked if I was there for the sale too. I shook my head. "No, just here for canvas panels," I said, already mentally planning my exit. But he persisted, asking if I was an artist. "A deep folk artist," I replied, and somehow that simple exchange opened a door between us. We began talking about art in that unguarded way you do when you recognize a kindred spirit, and when he mentioned Washington, D.C., I felt our connection shift into something more profound.

I told him I had just completed a painting about a DC artist named Carroll Sockwell. The reaction was immediate and visceral—he practically shouted that Sockwell had been a close friend of his. His excitement was palpable as he pressed me: What did I know about Sockwell? What had I learned?

The truth is, my connection to Sockwell's story runs through the basement of a row house where I lived during my time as a student at Howard University. That basement apartment belonged to Georgette Seabrooke Powell, a Harlem Renaissance artist whose presence in Washington's art community was monumental. She was Mrs. Powell to me—always Mrs. Powell—and she happened to be my best friend Jack's grandmother. Living beneath her was like living beneath a repository of living history. I would climb those stairs regularly, drawn by her warmth and wisdom, and we would sit together, talking and sharing meals. She was generous with her stories, weaving tales of art and life with the kind of detail and nuance that can only come from someone who had truly lived through it all.

Mrs. Powell was more than an artist; she was a pillar of the D.C. art community. She dedicated herself to nurturing and supporting other artists, opening doors and creating opportunities wherever she could. Every year, she organized her Annual Art in the Park at Malcolm X Park on 16th Street, an event that became a cornerstone of the local arts scene. To her, I was something of a hybrid—part grandson, part friend, part art assistant. Whenever she needed something done—a painting delivered across town, organized her studio, walls painted in her home—I was there. It wasn't obligation; it was devotion. She had given me so much simply by allowing me into her world.

Among all the stories Mrs. Powell shared, she spoke most frequently about Carroll Sockwell, though the tales were often tinged with sadness. She would talk about his brilliance as an artist, but also about his struggles—particularly his deteriorating mental health during the time he lived and worked in the former Lansburgh's department store building in downtown Washington, D.C. After the department store shuttered its doors, the building had been transformed into temporary studio space for artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It became a haven for creative souls, but for Sockwell, it also became a place where his demons grew louder.

One evening, Mrs. Powell's voice grew quieter, more somber, as she told me about the night Sockwell took his own life. It was shortly after one of his art openings—a moment that should have been celebratory, a validation of his work and vision. Instead, it became his final act. The story haunted me, lingering somewhere in the back of my mind for years.

Then one day, while sitting alone in my studio, surrounded by my own canvases and half-formed ideas, Sockwell's story surfaced again with an urgency I couldn't ignore. I began researching obsessively, gathering every fragment of information I could find about his life, his work, his struggles. As I painted, his story poured onto the canvas—not just the tragedy, but the humanity, the art, the loss.

And there I was, months later, standing in that Blick art store, describing this very painting to a complete stranger who turned out to be anything but. He was someone who had known Sockwell intimately, who had walked alongside him, who carried his own memories of the man I had only known through stories and research. The synchronicity felt almost surreal.

The accounts say that in 1992, Carroll Sockwell jumped from the Pennsylvania Avenue bridge in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The facts are sparse, clinical, stripped of the complexity of a life lived. But I created this piece as something more than documentation—it's a memorial, a recognition, an attempt to honor the artist Carroll Sockwell and the legacy of his nonrepresentational drawings, paintings, and assemblages. It's my way of saying that his life mattered, that his art mattered, and that even in his darkest moments, he left something behind that deserves to be remembered and celebrated.

Through Mrs. Powell's stories, through my own research, through that chance encounter in an art supply store, Sockwell's presence has woven itself into my own artistic journey. And perhaps that's exactly what art is supposed to do—connect us across time, across tragedy, across the distances between stranger and friend, life and death, silence and remembrance.