Mixed Media Collage & Silhouette
heirlooms (April-July 2024)
As solo exhibition artist at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland, the absences in the archive inspired silhouettes in collage of Black life, Black love, and Black family. HEIRLOOMS Academy Art Museum, Easton, Maryland April 5 - July 14, 2024.
legacy: civil rights at 60 (January-February 2024)
The DC Commission on Arts and Humanities celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act with art from DC artists that expressed the meaning of that landmark legislation. January - February, 2024.
behind her gaze (september 2023)
Behind Her Gaze, an inquiry into memory and remembering. Collecting, preserving, and building a narrative archive of the interior lives of ancestor mothers from archive photographs.
Remember the Names of Slaves and The Children of Slaves Remember
Behind Her Gaze
COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART (JULY 2022)
Layering hand-cut designs, stitchwork, and porch-talk storytelling traditions, Darlene R. Taylor creates visual prose poetry on textured papers in a multidisciplinary form of narrative. The panels of what she calls her stories feature intergenerational re-membering. Using collage and lyrical language, the works imagine the unspoken narratives of Black women and girls and Black life.
The panels on each wall form a visual story of memories and tellings beginning with ingredients for a recipe and ending with a tribute to Fannie, a foremother who was likely enslaved. The stories are drawn from notes on fragments, ephemeral artifacts, and archival research as the writer (re)imagines biography of Black women public history often neglects. The collective works expand the written narrative from Taylor’s prose poem “Blood on a Blackberry.”
