Tim Tate co-founded the Washington Glass School to break every rule he’d inherited. A quarter century later, it’s still running — and so is he.
The first thing you should know about Tim Tate is that he didn’t expect any of this to last.
When he and his co-founders — Michael Janis and Erwin Timmers — opened the Washington Glass School in the early 2000s, Tate gave the whole project maybe three years. He was running an experiment, not building an institution. The question driving it was deceptively simple: what would a glass school look like if it wasn’t tethered to the conventions of classic studio glass? Could it survive? Could it actually make something?
Twenty-five years and thousands of students later, the answer is self-evident.
Tate began his art career as a young HIV-positive queer man in the full, brutal heat of the AIDS crisis. He was the founder and director of the Triangle Artist Group in Washington, DC, and the director of the city’s first Art Against AIDS charity event — a benefit that raised funds for the newly established DC LGBTQ+ Community Center and the HIV-positive children’s ward at Washington Children’s Hospital. He was shaped by that community, trained in its values, fluent in its urgency. Civil rights and human justice weren’t themes he would later introduce into his work. They were the water he swam in from the beginning.
That formation never left him. It structured how he thought about art, about purpose, and eventually about what a school could be.
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The Washington Glass School was founded on a principle that sounds obvious but is, in practice, radical: everyone’s success is not achieved at the expense of anyone else’s. Tate had spent time in studios corroded by envy, watching artists diminish each other. He wanted something different. A rising tide, he believed, floated all boats — and so the school was built with that ethos embedded in its architecture.
The governance structure reflects the same logic. Tate, Janis, and Timmers operate as equal co-directors, each carrying a different set of responsibilities. When disagreement arises, they vote — and two out of three must agree. “We all had the same goal,” Tate says simply. “To keep the school alive and thriving.”
That structure has held for 25 years. Not because there have been no disagreements, but because the underlying commitment was always shared.
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The artistic agenda was never modest. Tate wanted to use electronics. Video. Wood, plastic, ceramics, paint. He wanted to find out what glass could become when it wasn’t required to stay within the boundaries drawn by 20th-century studio tradition.
Early on, he and William Warmus — the former curator of glass at the Corning Museum — founded a Facebook discussion group they called “Glass Secessionism,” a deliberate echo of Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo Secessionism movement. The name alone provoked. People were annoyed. Definitions were demanded. The two men eventually produced a 17-page warrant articulating what they meant.
Monica Moses, the then-editor of American Craft Magazine told them the controversy would be short-lived — that the ideas would simply become the norm. “And so it did,” Tate says now, with something closer to relief than triumph.
Technology in his work, he explains, was never an end in itself. It was a tool. A metaphor. “A video was worth a thousand words” — an expansion of a single image, a way of deepening what glass alone could carry.
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The work deepened alongside the politics. What had seemed to wane in the calmer early 2000s — the appetite for socially engaged art — came back hard as the political climate grew more charged. Today, one of Tate’s favorite classes to teach is called “Using Glass for Social Justice.” The curriculum, in a sense, is his biography.
His sculptures move through reliquary traditions and Victorian curiosity cabinets, through early cinema and the formal logic of Georges Méliès. They are blown and cast, embedded with video screens, built around found objects, animated by the tension between fragility and permanence that glass uniquely embodies. They hold names, poems, histories.
His piece Nine Future Supreme Court Justices imagines an LGBTQ+ legal future — nine figures, each identified, each carrying biographical weight. In Service, In Secret animates archival photographs of queer men and women in uniform, from the Civil War through World War II. When the Armor Becomes Wings places two glass figures in the act of shedding the armor of survival — one holding a crocus, one a red bird — beneath a blown glass dome crowned with a winged heart.
These are not decorative objects. They are arguments in glass.
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The recognition has arrived steadily, and Tate wears it carefully. He has shown at the Venice Biennale exhibitions three times. He exhibited at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg before the Russia–Ukraine war made that world inaccessible. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery. He designed the New Orleans AIDS Memorial.
He carries all of it back to DC deliberately. “I want DC and the glass school to be realized as major players in the art world,” he says. “It’s such a great city with astounding artists. I add what I can.”
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Now comes the largest undertaking of his career.
Imagining Utopia: What Would America Look Like If It Were a Queer Accepting Country? is a major solo traveling exhibition that opens in September 2027 at the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, then travels to the Lowe Art Museum in Miami, the Asheville Art Museum, and finally the Palm Springs Art Museum, where it runs through all of 2029. It is the kind of show that, as Tate acknowledges quietly, he couldn’t have imagined mounting a decade ago. He credits a seven-month collaborative relationship with the MacArthur Fellow Joyce Scott — an artist who works at the intersection of beadwork, performance, and social critique — as a turning point. Scott showed him the scale his thinking could reach.
The exhibition poses its question directly, without softening. It does not ask audiences to abstract the politics into aesthetics. It asks them to imagine — concretely — what a more accepting America would look like, feel like, be.
The piece The Common Thread, a six-foot collaborative cast glass tile wall made with Michael Janis, anchors the exhibition’s material ambition. The Resurrections series — which includes 12 Souls, 12 Resurrections — enacts a different kind of memorial, one that refuses finality.
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Ask Tim Tate what he’s most proud of that has nothing to do with his own artwork, and the answer comes without hesitation: Over 6,000 students in 25 years. A school that chose DC and that DC chose back.
Ask him what belief he’s completely reversed in 25 years: “That there is but one way to do anything. Everything has numerous paths.”
Ask him what he would do if he couldn’t make glass for five years: “I would become the world’s best pie maker.”
And ask him what would happen if that 25-year-old version of himself walked into the studio today — the young HIV-positive artist navigating the AIDS crisis, running benefits, learning to make things out of fire — and he pauses.
“He would probably start crying tears of joy.”
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The Washington Glass School celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, with a group exhibit at Brentwood Arts Exchange in Brentwood, MD. Tim Tate’s touring exhibition Imagining Utopia opens at the Katzen Arts Center at American University in September 2027.
