Born in 1943, Carroll Sockwell was raised in Washington, DC, as the youngest of five brothers. Sockwell's youth was checkered by domestic unrest, but with the support of his art therapist, Elinor Ulman, he took art classes at the Corcoran School of Art as a teenager. After turning 17, Sockwell moved to New York, immersing himself in the art scene, where he famously met Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning.
Ultimately, Sockwell struggled to find a stable living situation in New York, and in 1963 returned to Washington to join what became the Washington Color School. There, Sockwell developed his distinctively expressive abstraction, combining the gestural and linear, and began exhibiting at Jefferson Place Gallery. In 1974, championed by director Walter Hopps, Sockwell received a breakthrough solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. His work was included in many gallery and museum exhibitions in Washington DC, and at the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1992, Sockwell had a large retrospective exhibition at the Washington Project for the Arts, just before his tragic death by suicide.
Sockwell's work is in many institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Menil Collection, the American University Art Museums, Bowie State University, the Delaware Art Museum and the Federal Reserve Bank Collection. Sockwell recently was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, George Washington University, A Corcoran Homecoming: The Art of Carroll Sockwell, January 24 - March 9, 2024.
