Rip! Tear! Collage as Critique

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DC Commission on the Arts

Eye Street Gallery

200 I St. SE, Washington DC 20003 

In a time when our nation—and the social fabric of the District—is experiencing deep division, artists are turning to collage as a democratic strategy to give platform to stories of rupture, repair, and reassembly. Rip! Tear! Collage as Critique calls on 23 DC-based artists who use collage as a conceptual approach to reconciling the fractured, fast-paced, and often contradictory stories and symbols of American history and modern life. The collected works stray from conventional approaches to paper collage, employing methods such as assemblage, quilting, bricolage, video, and photomontage that knowingly upset the boundaries of the genre.

Exhibited artists: Alanna Fields, Amber Janay Cooper, Amber Robles-Gordon, Andrew Kastner, Anne Bouie, Aziza Claudia Gibson-Hunter, Connor Czora, Darlene R. Taylor, Guayarmina Fernandez, Helen Zughaib, Jarvis Grant, Joana Stillwell, Joanathan Bessaci, Leniqueca Welcome, Lex Marie, Marc Choi, Mark Kelner, Matthew Mann, Michael Janis, Paula Mans, Rebecca Perez, Tim Tate, and Zsudayka Nzinga.

Curated by Michelle May-Curry, Ph.D., Curator, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities

She Speaks: Black Women Artists and the Power of Historical Memory 

Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum

84 Franklin Street

Annapolis, Maryland 21401

Through a diverse range of mediums—including collage, painting, print, photography, textile, installation, and time-based media—She Speaks acknowledges Black women as active participants in the making of this country, highlighting artists who operate as historians, archivists, and scholars to tell their stories.  Curated by Martina Dodd, Curator of Collections & Exhibitions at the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum, this exhibit brings together  contemporary Black women artists whose works bear witness to the past, illuminate its impact on the present, and conjure Afrofuturist visions. 

Featured artists include Elizabeth Catlett, Alanna Fields, Dr. Joan M. E. Gaither, Charlyn Griffith-Oro, Khaleelah I. L. Harris, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Jeannine Kayembe-Oro, Zsudayka Nzinga, Ada Pinkston, Beverly Price, Faith Ringgold, Noreen Smith, Darlene R. Taylor, Jessica Valoris, Savannah Wood, and Alisha B. Wormsley. 

https://bdmuseum.maryland.gov/exhibitions

McLean Project for the Arts

Emerson Gallery

1234 Ingleside

McLean, Virginia

Darlene R. Taylor, Spring Solo Exhibition Artist

In Heirlooms: Garden Beauty, Darlene R. Taylor continues her series of mixed media collage and silhouettes memory narrative portraits that reflect on beauty, love, labor, and nature. 

McLean Project for the Arts (MPA) is a leading contemporary visual arts non-profit organization dedicated to connecting art and community.  

 Darlene R. Taylor - McLean Project for the Arts 

Gibbes Museum of Art

135 Meeting Street

Charleston, South Carolina

Kennard Kennedy HBCU Showcase

Mixed media silhouettes by Howard University artist-scholar Darlene R. Taylor

Baby Doll

Day Break

Yes, She Can (#1 and #2 of the series)

Pepco Edison Place Gallery

Washington, DC

Rest, a Spell, a solo exhibition of the artist's HEIRLOOMS collage silhouettes. 

Rest, a Spell gathers Taylor's meditations on everyday Black women and girls. The silhouette figures rest in the quiet spaces of home and nature, reflecting on the past so that history is not forgotten. 

Memory pulses within the artist’s chosen materials—vintage linens, laces, cottons, and buttons preserved and handed down in acts of love and remembrance.

Gallery photos by Vivian Marie Doering.

International Arts & Artists

Hillyer Gallery

Washington, DC

For The Beauty She Gave Us, a solo exhibition of collage silhouette heirloom textiles on paper examines beauty in historical landscapes. 

Taylor merges heirloom fabrics and paper in portraits that meditate on the lifework, sweatwork, and lovework of Black mothers. Memory pulses within the artist’s chosen materials—vintage linens, laces, cottons, and buttons handed down from one generation to another. The planting season blooms with longing as silhouetted figures pause in quiet fields, sites of refuge and contemplation, and burial grounds.  Taylor’s (re)membered stories honor mothers for whom there has been no song or poem. Thus, For the Beauty She Gave Us both celebrates and mourns.

https://athillyer.org

 Academy Art Museum

Easton, Maryland 

Mother: Archive File Numbers 1-8 mixed media heirlooms by Darlene R. Taylor

"The art on view in these galleries ranges from the well-known historical subjects of Elizabeth Catlett and Jacob Lawrence, to Carole Boston Weatherford and Jeffery Weatherford's poems and portraits of their ancestors, to the imagined, but fully present, women in Faith Ringgold's and Darlene R. Taylor's textile-based works. All share a common interest in contributing to an artistic archive of Black history that is both public and deeply personal."
https://academyartmuseum.org/kin-rooted-in-hope/

Gallery photograph by Jeff McGuiness.
 

 Gibson Center for the Arts Atrium

Kohl Gallery 

Washington College

Chestertown, Maryland 

Remembering the Names of Slaves is a large-scale mixed media heirlooms wall banner by Darlene R. Taylor

Kohl Gallery presents “Remembering the Names of Slaves” in the Gibson Center for the Arts Atrium immediately outside Kohl Gallery.  Arranged with vintage linens, lace, cottons, and buttons, this large-scale work from Taylor’s Heirlooms Series honors the memories of Black women and girls.  Speaking about this work, Taylor said, “Heirlooms is a conversation between generations inspired by historical landscapes and imagined personal narratives of people we know little about.  When I discover archival images of unnamed women, I want to touch behind the gazes that greet me to know the whispers, witness, and memories they hold.”
 

This work is on view courtesy of the Amy Haines and Richard Marks Collection and has been arranged to coincide with the exhibition Kin: Rooted in Hope, which also features artwork by Darlene R. Taylor at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland from May 1 - May 2026. 

https://www.washcoll.edu/arts/kohl-gallery/index.php

Photograph by Joseph Hyde.