PHILADELPHIA – If You Couldn’t Get to Henry Taylor’s great retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA)which ran until April 30, and I don’t want to wait for this exhibition to go east until the Whitney in October, or simply want to see another facet of the artist’s work, go to Fabric museum and workshop (FM&W) in Philadelphia, where the results of Taylor’s 18-month residency are on display on the second floor.

These are not the large, lush figurative works that Taylor is best known for, but they do share the “hunting and gathering” process he describes for his paintings.

Taylor worked with FM&W staff to obtain materials from the city’s Recycled Artists in Residency (RAIR) program. Having broken free from the boundaries of the canvas in the 1990s, painting on the surfaces of found and abandoned household objects such as furniture, cereal boxes, empty cleaning bottles and cigarette packs, he moved on to assemblage, using items from flea markets, vintage stores, or otherwise salvaged.

A tall, canvas-wrapped boat-like construction atop a blue-painted pallet greets a visitor as they disembark from the FW&M elevator. Atop the massive apparition is a chair painted gold with jagged twigs, and from which rises a tree from which hang black plastic bags and three large mounds of afro hair in three colors (black, brown and red). Ropes extend from the back, like jets of water, to connect to a huge wooden loom from which other ropes hang, and from each hangs a metal door hinge and bottles of water. water bottles filled with pebbles.

This ship has arrived, evoking both colonial times, slave ships and contemporary encampments of homeless people.

“Times don’t change, fast enough!is the title Taylor gave to a painting by Philando Castile that was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 2017. Castile was a 32-year-old black American who was shot during a traffic stop by a police officer in the suburbs from Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2016. The same sentiment appears in the title he chose for this exhibition, Nothing changes, nothing strange.

This is Taylor’s first foray into fabric work. A chain link fence is woven with golden fleece, becoming a checkered pattern. Using warp and weft (horizontal and vertical) – the criss-cross fabric pattern, Taylor examines how people, like materials, are held together, separated, and categorized socially and systematically. This pattern, called tartan, is traditionally associated with Scottish clans and families.

Taylor began the residency by investigating the racist and divisive histories of tartan plaid. “It’s always been a really partisan fabric,” said Viccy Coltman, professor of art history at the University of Edinburgh. BBCCulture in 2017.

FW&M chief curator and director of curatorial affairs DJ Hellerman said Taylor was influenced by the 2018 documentary, Who put the Klan in the Ku Klux Klan, in which archaeologist and historian Neil Oliver examines the links between racism today in the Deep South and the Scots who first occupied it. While hundreds of thousands of Scots emigrated to the United States in the 18th century after being driven from their land, the arrival of cotton in the United States enabled them to become slaveholders and wealthy plantation owners. After losing in the Civil War, they soured and formed a fraternal society which became the Ku Klux Klan.

Taylor creates tartans with neon lights, wraps boxes with tartan fabric, and on a tied eyelet tarp with blonde and afro hair, he ponders the associations of tartan and Tarzan. Using a loom custom built for him by FM&W, Taylor created black-on-black tartan fabric. In another work, in which a large, red-painted tarp is draped against the wall, the tartan is deconstructed, like torn strips of plaid cascading along a rubber band and a bicycle wheel. Elsewhere, a totem pole of bicycle wheels sits alongside a clothesline of tartan kilts.

Born in 1958, Taylor grew up in Oxnard, California, where his father painted houses and bars at a US government naval air base. Her first exposure to art was in the houses her mother was paid to clean. Among the subjects Taylor studied at Oxnard College were journalism, anthropology, and stage design. Abstract artist James Jarvaise, then head of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts, encouraged Taylor in his artistic practice. In the 1990s, he studied at the California Institute of the Arts while working as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Her practice draws on her knowledge of art history and the work of Alice Neel, Kerry James Marshall, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, David Hammons and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.

Artists in residence are experimenting at FM&W, and while they aren’t required to use fabric, some, including Louise Bourgeois, do. Taylor also took FM&W’s “fabric” seriously. Along one wall is a shelf stacked with folded garments – tartans, African prints (whose manufacture has been appropriated by European and Chinese companies) and sweatshirts, including hoodies, tracing the African American history through fabric.

Henry Taylor: Nothing changes, nothing strange continues at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA) through October 22. The exhibition was curated by Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs DJ Hellerman and Senior Project Coordinator Abby Lutz in conjunction with the artist and the FWM Studio team.