Lead Mentor

Tim Tate is a Washington, DC native, and has been working with glass as a sculptural medium for the past 25 years. He has shown nationally and beyond since the 1990’s, including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Boca Raton Museum, Art Basel Scope in Switzerland, Art Miami during Art Basel-Miami, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Renwick Gallery, the Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia and commercial galleries from Washington, DC to London and Berlin.

He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship from the University of Sunderland, England in 2012. His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, the Mint Museum, the Fuller Museum, the Katzen Art Center of American University, the Milwaukee Art Museum and Vanderbilt University Museum.

Tim Tate has spent many years championing LGTBQ rights in all its forms. As a 40-year HIV+ Queer Man, he founded the Triangle Artist Group in the early 90’s and helped curate the very first HIV+ art show there. He is also the designer of the New Orleans AIDS Monument.

He has spoken at Yale University on Glass and Conflict…. detailing his own LGTBQ activism in glass. He has participated in Glasstress 2019 at the Venice Biennale, 2021 at the Boca Raton Museum and the Glasstress at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. He is also co-administrators and founders of the discussion group, “21st Century Glass”.

Artist Statement/

Over the years queer people have been called many derogatory names.  Amongst ourselves however we had names that were acceptable to us. (Uranians, Friends of Dorothy, Gay, etc.)

This piece offers thought for new terms of love and acceptance we can embrace. (Keepers of the Flame, Double Bat Boys, Protectors of our Hearts) just to name a few.

Without giving my intentions for every square here, what would you think of as a new identity for queer people in the future might be with a positive identity?

Arden Colley (she/they, b. 1986) is a DC-area artist working in multiple disciplines, with a focus on the natural world and humanity’s place within and impact upon it. She holds an MA in Stop-Motion Animation from BAU College of Arts & Design Barcelona, and has accumulated years of both independent and formal training in observational drawing and realism. In the last couple of years she has experimented with soft pastel and dry pigment, to achieve delicately blended, rich, matte color ways that explore how light and negative space define reality. In the past year, she has embarked on sculptural work in kilnform glass at the Washington Glass School. Her artistic influences include David Hockney, Mark Rothko, Shara Hughes, Leiko Ikemura, Jan Svankmajer, and Suzie Templeton.

Artist Statement/

Our isolation from each other
and our separation from Nature
correlate
Healing one connection
means healing the other
We reap what we sow together

C.S. Corbin is a multidisciplinary artist examining how we contort ourselves in and out of the confines of identities. Corbin celebrates this malleability as a means of survival to ultimately defy the constraints of our cultural narratives around gender and sexuality. Through an array of mediums and figurative imagery, their work depicts abstracted personal and observational moments, creating alternate realities to imagine liberated futures or reframe memories. They incorporate human-like elements of the environment to parallel human experience with metamorphic qualities of nature. Collectively, their body of work reflects their personal healing process of honoring past and future selves and the multifaceted beauty of transition.

Artist Statement/

The Heirlooms are artifacts of the past and the future, each frame expresses within it an ongoing story of trans resistance. The glass holds these histories with the nostalgic care of a family photo wall, allowing one to see the intersecting truths of transness and nature. 

The black and white portraits represent the power of living authentically as forms of rebellion. These figures float behind protruding glass portraits of nature from a future beyond societal and legislative restrictions; a future where there is freedom to transform.

The Heirlooms honor the revolutionaries that have come before us as well as grant us the space to keep dreaming at this crucial moment in our history. This body of work recognizes trans people as innate to humanity and nature itself; we have always existed and will continue to exist.

Nilou Kazemzadeh (b. 1993) is an Iranian-American artist based in Maryland. She holds a B.A. in Studio Art and Masters in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Maryland College Park and a Masters in Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries in the DMV area including the Katzen Art Center, Maryland Art Place, Target Gallery, and IA&A Hillyer. She is currently an adjunct instructor at Montgomery College and Prince George's Community College.

Artist Statement/

In this work, I depict the necessary tools and materials in order to plant a seed. This includes the seed itself, a water pitcher, pruning shears, and a shovel. The seed will be planted alongside the native flora of this land. Will it grow and survive? 

This piece questions our individual place on this contested land. As our government cracks down on immigration, uprooting families and loved ones away from each other, the very ecosystem of our society is under threat. Thus, collective care is necessary in order to nurture the seeds we sow.

Tina Villadolid research-based practice is fueled by the tension of her paradoxical identity as a Filipina American. She is both the colonized and the colonizer, an inheritance that belongs to the diaspora shaped by the American conquest of the Philippines. From this potent liminal space, she reimagines her ancestors’ ingenuity, resilience, wry humor, valor, care, and connection to the land as a way to disrupt enduring legacies of colonial dehumanization. Her work re-embodies ancestral memory to physicalize a power shift.

Artist Statement/

Salvaged bears heritage. It recalls ancestral memory of a sea and land-based community culture before its exploitation by imperialist invasions, of societies led by female and femme shamans before patriarchal violence forced a change in narrative. 

Held in glass, the legacies of our ancestors are translucent. 
The light that passes through is seen, felt, and shifting within us.

Diana Baird N’Diaye

Geoffrey Bowton