It was Elinor Ulman, a noted art therapist and teacher at the Corcoran School of Art, who recognized Sockwell’s artistic talent and mentored him through his early years as an artist. At the age of seventeen, he was already in New York City, completely immersed in the watershed years of that city’s ascendancy as the international center for the arts. He was completely swept up in the maturity of the Abstract Expressionist movement, as well as the beginnings of Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism.

Carroll Sockwell returned to Washington, DC in 1963, at an increasingly fertile time in the capital city’s artistic development. A growing community of artists was establishing an identity as the Washington Color School. The Phillips Collection was of considerable importance to Sockwell’s aesthetic growth, especially for its collection of the artists in the Modernist canon he most loved — notably, the works of Klee, Dove, and Braque. Willem de Looper, a former curator at the Philips, once wrote that Sockwell "knew the collection as well as I did – and I worked there."

Sockwell worked as a curator at the Barnett-Aden Gallery, the nation's first museum of African-American art, established in 1943 by James Herring and Alonzo Aden. He exhibited at the Jefferson Place Gallery, then under the direction of Nesta Dorrance. Jefferson Place, founded in the late 1950s by Alice Denney (who later founded Washington Project for the Arts), was a nexus for Washington artists, as well as avant-garde artists from outside the city. By the early 1970s, Sockwell acclaim was established, culminating in his solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1974, and group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. These successes were followed by exhibitions at several Washington galleries, including Middendorf Gallery, Barbara Fiedler Gallery, and in 1983, at Harry Lunn Gallery.

Carroll Sockwell’s art is a body of intensely personal work that resonated deeply within the Modernist context in which he labored, but he was not driven by its challenges as much as he himself reflected those challenges in his artistic consciousness. He was extremely sophisticated in his integration of the disparate Modernist strains of geometric and gestural abstraction. Understandably, given his own personal struggles, his art is often the odyssey of a dark, driven, troubled persona on the verge of oblivion.

The success and acclaim that Sockwell found in the mid-1970s did not follow him into the next decade, no doubt fueling his already troubled esteem. The relative lack of acclaim did not reflect any diminution of his powers as much as it did the capriciousness of contemporary artistic tastes.