Founded in 1938, the Crary Art Gallery is a public art museum whose mid-century modern building in the historic center of Warren, Pennsylvania, has long provided the region with a significant institutional home for American art. Its architecture is considered and particular: warm wood ceilings, marble walls, geometric carved wooden doors, polished floors that catch and hold the light from above. These are spaces that understand the relationship between a building and the work it contains, that have been designed with the specific gravity of art in mind. It was across the museum's main gallery and into additional gallery spaces throughout the building that Boro Land: Layered Worlds found its first major museum platform in the United States.

The tapestries that make up Boro Land are constructed from hand-dyed, hand-printed and painted textiles, historical fabrics and found materials, stitched and quilted together and hung from bamboo rods, their surfaces carrying the accumulated evidence of previous lives. Faces emerge from patchwork grounds assembled from dozens of separate pieces of cloth, each patch its own colour and texture, each seam visible, the whole held together by stitching that makes no attempt to conceal itself. Numbers run along the borders in Cooley's characteristic private notation, columns of them marking the edges of compositions that resist clean edges in every other respect. The works are raw where they end, fabric fraying at the borders, the boundary between the piece and the wall around it left deliberately unresolved. They hang from their bamboo rods with the weight of things that have been carried a long way and set down carefully.

The contrast between the museum's architectural precision and the deliberately imperfect surfaces of the textiles gave the installation an immediate and sustained visual tension. Against the marble walls and warm wood of the Crary's mid-century interiors, with their clean lines and considered proportions, the layered, stitched, worn and repurposed surfaces of the tapestries asserted a different understanding of what materials are for and what they carry. The building speaks of permanence and institutional care. The works speak of use, repair, transformation and the particular beauty of things that have been through something. Across the multiple gallery spaces the exhibition occupied, that conversation between the architecture and the art produced an atmosphere that neither would have generated alone.

The works themselves span a range of scale and register. Large figurative tapestries dominate the main gallery walls, their patchwork faces assembled from accumulated cloth with the same deliberate layering that Cooley brings to his painted surfaces, the textile medium demanding a different kind of attention from the eye and the hand. Smaller works populate the additional galleries, each one its own complete world, the series accumulating across the museum's rooms into something that rewards the time it takes to move through it fully.

The Crary further extended the exhibition's reach through an Ekphrasis workshop in which participants wrote poetry and prose directly in response to the works on view, the literary and the visual in sustained conversation across three consecutive Sundays in February. It was a fitting response to a body of work that has always understood that the most interesting conversations happen between things that do not, on the surface, appear to belong together.