for the beauty she gave us (JULY 2025)
July 5 - 27, 2025
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.
International Arts & Artists
Hillyer Gallery, Washington, DC
Art/history/archive
May 1 - June 29, 2025
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.
Darlene R. Taylor: heirlooms (April-July 2024)
As solo exhibition artist at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland, the absences in the archive inspired silhouettes of under-imagined Black life and family in Heirlooms.
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.
heirlooms from behind her gaze (September 2023)
Behind Her Gaze, an inquiry into how memories survive. Collecting, preserving, and archiving narratives of the interior lives of ancestor mothers.
The historic New African Church building, Washington, DC, September 2023
COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART (JULY 2022)
In Behind Her Gaze at the Columbus Museum of Art, Taylor begins her examination of porch-talk storytelling that responds to historical omissions. She creates visual prose poetry on textured papers in a multidisciplinary form of narrative that assembles a critical counter-archive. The panels feature intergenerational (re)membering from the unspoken interiors of Black women and girls.
The panels 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 neglects.
The collective works expand the written narrative from Taylor’s prose poem “Blood on a Blackberry” to a visual story.