Imagining Utopia
Imagining Utopia: What Could America Look Like if It Were a Queer Accepting Country? is a traveling museum exhibition that poses a single, sincere question through the medium of glass. Rather than cataloging injury or protesting absence, the show imagines repair, a present-tense history granted to the people the historical record left in its margins. Across cast and blown glass, video reliquaries, mirrored spheres, and lenticular panels, the work extends tenderness, recognition, and futurity to queer lives that were denied all three, insisting these figures were always worthy of the veneration the pieces bestow on them.
The exhibition's formal language borrows deliberately from devotion and wonder. Reliquary cabinets and Victorian curiosity-cabinet forms lend the visual grammar of the sacred to ordinary queer intimacy, while embedded video animates archival photographs so their sitters seem to live and breathe in the here and now. The Resurrections series is central to this: glass reliquaries that restore small, tender moments, a glance, a touch, a companionship, to men and women whose lives required concealment. Other works, from a mirrored sphere reclaiming the word "woke" to a hand-worked crown made with trans youth honoring Marsha P. Johnson, turn the question of acceptance over from many angles at once.
The show opens at the American University Museum in Washington, DC, in September 2027, a hometown premiere, before traveling to the Lowe Art Museum in Miami, the Asheville Art Museum, and the Palm Springs Art Museum through 2029. Each venue brings its own cultural context to the work, with the Lowe presentation in particular drawing on the University of Miami's Latin American and Caribbean framing and the Catholic reliquary tradition as an entry point. Together the four stops carry a single proposition across very different American audiences: that a country where no one needs to hide is not only imaginable but, through the act of imagining it, already coming into view.
Thirty-one works in total, representing the breadth of Tim Tate's career. Final selections are subject to the exhibition curator and institution. Dimensions and media follow each title.