Tim Tate

Tim Tate was born in Washington, DC in 1960, and has lived and worked there ever since. He came to glass in 1989, the year he was diagnosed HIV positive and told he had about a year to live. He took up the material in order to leave something behind. He is still here, and the body of work that decision started now runs to more than three decades.

In 2001 he co-founded the Washington Glass School, which has since grown into the second largest warm glass school in the United States. He remains its co-director, and much of the work in this exhibition was made there.

Tate was among the first artists to embed video and electronics inside cast and blown glass, and that invention is the engine of Imagining Utopia. A sealed glass reliquary holding a moving image lets an archival photograph breathe again: a hand finds another hand, a glance is returned, and a life that had to be lived in private is granted a present tense. The same instinct runs through the mirrored spheres and lenticular panels, where an image changes depending on where the viewer chooses to stand.

His subject has been constant. LGBTQ+ dignity, the history of the AIDS crisis, memory, and what he calls a utopian queer futurism: not a protest against what was taken, but a picture of what a country might look like once no one has to hide in it. He designed the international AIDS memorial in New Orleans, co-directed Art Against AIDS, and founded the Triangle Artist Group in the early 1990s.

He has taught at Penland School of Craft and lectured at Yale University, the Smithsonian, and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, where a residency produced Queen for a Millennium with the help of LGBTQ+ students from a local high school.