Love and Planting Boxwoods

Blown glass, glass beads, bell jar dome

Imagining Utopia asks what America looks like when queer lives are fully honored and protected. This piece answers quietly, with two figures and a garden.

For a long time, we loved half-revealed, our bodies present, our truest selves guarded beneath necessity and silence. Long-term love was never impossible, but it was harder-won, and rarely granted the luxury of an assumed future.

These two figures emerge from that concealment. One holds a red bird. The other, a crocus bulb, small, patient, alive with intention, symbols of growth and life. Around them, glass beads cling and drift: the residue of what was hidden, falling away.

To plant a boxwood is to believe in fifty years. It is an act of radical optimism, a declaration that we will be here, that we expect to grow old together, that our love deserves a horizon. In the world this exhibition imagines, that expectation is not extraordinary. It is simply Tuesday.