About the Event

Firsthand Experiences bring contemporary creators together with learners ages 13 and older for hands-on programs that combine creative arts, conversations, and discovery.

About the workshop series: Explore concepts and techniques inspired by works in Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California. Each workshop in the series will explore different works and ways of making. Attend one or multiple sessions! All materials will be provided; no experience necessary.

The third workshop in a three-part series inspired by Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, this hands-on experience features multidisciplinary artist and writer Darlene Taylor. With Taylor’s guidance, participants will consider how textiles hold meaning and how fragments of memory can be assembled into visual stories. Drawing on text for inspiration, participants will create a quilt story from fabric, trim, and other fiber-based materials using appliqué techniques.

About the Instructor

Darlene R. Taylor is an artist, writer, and scholar. She reimagines narratives of Black women’s lives across generations through mixed-media collage silhouettes that combine vintage linens, laces, cottons, and buttons with stitchwork and piecing traditions. For her art book HEIRLOOMS (2024), which unites her visual art with poetry and prose, Taylor mined historical archives to explore kinship, place, and memory.

Taylor earned a BA from American University and an MFA from Stonecoast, at the University of Southern Maine, where she serves on its Writing for Social Justice Initiative. A cultural arts advocate, Taylor promotes literary citizenship through community-based organizations and libraries. She is a contributor to the 2023 anthology How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill, and her stories appear in numerous journals and anthologies. She is also a senior lecturer at Howard University. Her visual works have been featured by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum (Annapolis, MD) as well as in solo exhibitions at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio (2022), the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland (2024), and International Arts & Artists at Hillyer Gallery in Washington, DC (2025).

Workshop Series

• 9/19/2026 Firsthand Experience: Collage (sold out)
• 10/10/2026 Firsthand Experience: Hand Stitching
• 11/14/2026 Firsthand Experience: Appliqué All Day

Questions? Email education@nmwa.org.