Tim Tate - Mixed Media Queer Sculptor

Artist Bio

Tim Tate is a Washington, DC–based mixed-media sculptor whose work integrates glass, video, and installation to examine queer history, social justice, memory, and speculative futures. He is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Washington Glass Studio & School, an institution that has played a significant role in expanding the discourse around contemporary glass and mixed-media practice.

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Tate’s work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), the State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg), the Venice Biennale (Glasstress), and the Boca Raton Museum of Art. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Virginia Groot Foundation Award for Sculpture and the James Renwick Alliance Distinguished Artist Award.

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For over four decades, Tate has been deeply engaged in LGBTQ+ activism and cultural advocacy. A queer artist living with HIV for more than 40 years, he has worked at the intersection of art, visibility, and resistance since the early years of the AIDS crisis. He founded the Triangle Artist Group in the early 1990s, helped organize one of the first exhibitions of HIV-positive artists in Washington, DC, co-directed Art Against AIDS, and designed the New Orleans AIDS Memorial—now a site of public remembrance and healing.

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Tate is a Fulbright Scholar (University of Sunderland, UK) and has lectured widely on contemporary craft, queer history, and material culture, including invited talks at Yale University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of Glass, Tacoma. His work continues to challenge fixed narratives, asking how art can function as a site of care, resistance, and imaginative possibility.

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Artist Statement

My practice is rooted in the belief that materials carry memory, and that art can function as a site of witness—preserving stories that are too often erased, marginalized, or rendered invisible. By blending traditional craft with video and digital technologies, I construct objects that operate simultaneously as sculptures, reliquaries, and portals. These works ask how queer histories are archived, how trauma is transmitted, and how alternative futures might be imagined.

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Glass, mirrors, and moving images allow me to work with reflection, repetition, and illusion—formal strategies that echo the experience of living within contested identities and unstable social structures. My use of endless mirrors and video creates optical spaces that feel infinite yet intimate, inviting viewers to peer into worlds that do not physically exist but are nonetheless emotionally and politically real. These spaces function as speculative environments—visions of what could be, rather than what has been sanctioned.

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Much of my work engages directly with issues facing LGBTQ+ communities: loss, resilience, survival, and the ongoing struggle for equity. As a queer artist who has lived through the AIDS crisis and its aftermath, I understand memory not as nostalgia, but as a form of activism. Repetition in my work references both trauma and endurance—timelines that stretch endlessly into the past and future, reflecting patterns of oppression as well as the persistence of resistance.

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In recent years, my focus has shifted toward Utopian Queer Futurism—the act of imagining futures grounded in inclusion, care, and radical empathy. These imagined futures are not escapist; they are political propositions. They ask viewers to consider what America might look like if queer lives were not merely tolerated, but fully valued and protected.

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I am intentionally uncomfortable with fixed definitions—of medium, of time, of identity. My work moves fluidly between Victorian-era techno-fetishism, 20th-century studio glass, and 21st-century digital culture, reflecting a belief that history is not linear but layered. In this way, my sculptures become transparent reliquaries: vessels that hold fragments of the past while gesturing toward possible futures.

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Ultimately, my work is about looking—looking inward, looking backward, and looking ahead. These objects invite viewers to pause, to enter a space of reflection, and to imagine a world that does not yet exist, but must.

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