Tender / Tempered

Tender/Tempered

This diptych began as a collaboration between two old friends and fellow civil rights activists, Tim Tate and Michael Sylvan Robinson, an internationally exhibited genderqueer fiber artist whose textile work has intersected fashion, sculpture, and queer activism for decades, each working in the material the other doesn't. Robinson built the original portrait of Quentin Crisp in fiber, stitched, beaded, and layered in pink and violet, his profile raised from thread and textile. Tate then cast that same portrait in glass, translating every soft stitch into something clear, cold, and permanent. Displayed side by side, one version holds the warmth and irregularity of the handmade. The other has passed through the kiln and been fixed for good.

The pairing suits its subject, and it suits the two artists who made it. Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) was an English writer and raconteur who lived openly and flamboyantly as a gay man decades before it was safe to do so, becoming a reluctant icon after his memoir The Naked Civil Servant brought his story to a wide audience. He was flamboyant and openly effeminate in a mid-century England that punished all of it, and he outlasted the harassment by simply refusing to be anyone but himself. Rendering him first in yielding fiber and then in hard glass holds both sides of that life at once: the softness he never disguised, and the durability it took to survive being seen. The title names it directly, tempered means both hardened by fire and made gentle, the same paradox Crisp lived.

Read left to right, the work shows a soft thing becoming a hard one without losing its shape, a fair description of what endurance actually asks of people who can't or won't hide. It's also a fair description of what two artists who've spent decades in the same fight can build when they hand a subject back and forth between them.