In the fall Taylor returned to Tusculum College in Greenville, Tennessee, where he was working as a part-time art instructor, to take a full-time teaching position.
In 1970 Taylor attended the Toledo Museum School's Glass Workshop, where he met a number of the artists involved in the Studio Glass Movement, including Dominick Labino, Harvey Littleton, Harvey Leafgreen, Jack Schmidt, Doug Johnson, Tom McGlauchlin and Henry Halem.
In 1977, while serving as the chair of the art department at Peabody College, Taylor returned to graduate school at East Tennessee State University, where he was awarded an M.F.A.
He also found time to begin glass programs at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and Peters Valley Craft Center near Layton, New Jersey.
Glass artists who studied under Michael Taylor include Jiyong Lee, Jonathan Schmuck, and Sam Stark.
In the "Libidinous Manifest" series of 1969 Taylor sculpted organic ceramic forms that he placed open-end down on wood pedestals to proclaim their alliance with sculpture.
In contradiction to the sensual knobs and bulges of his forms, Taylor painted the sculptures with shiny enamel in eye-popping colors.
Upon his return to his Nashville, Tennessee studio Taylor continued his exploration of cut and assembled clear glass forms in his 1975–76 "N-Sequence" series.
[5]: 40 At the beginning of the 1980s Taylor's work in glass turned to classic vessel forms based on ancient Greek kraters, lekythoi and amphoras.
He returned to the symmetry and precision of his machine-like glass constructions, this time finding inspiration in the world of medicine and surgery.
[5]: 63 In the mid-1980s, Taylor was using bright color in small sections to focus the viewer's attention on central or connecting parts in a sculpture's composition.
At that time, he used the prefix "photo-" in his titles, as in "Photogenesis," "Photoreceptor" and "Photogenerator", to emphasize the interaction of light with his prismatic creations.
Taylor has expressed admiration for the modern artists Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp and Louise Nevelson as much for the revolutionary effect of their ideas on the course of art history as for the formal and visual qualities of their oeuvres.
[5]: 235–236 In a general way the structural model of DNA and electronic circuitry bear a visual resemblance to Taylor's constructions in glass.
Taylor's work can be found in the corporate collections of Bausch & Lomb, Rochester, New York; Coca-Cola, Atlanta, Georgia and Standard Oil, Chicago, Illinois, among others.