Imagining Utopia — What Could America Look Like If It Were a Queer Accepting Country? A traveling museum exhibition of glass by Tim Tate, opening September 2027: Washington DC, Miami, Asheville, Palm Springs.

Imagining Utopia

What Could America Look Like If It Were a Queer Accepting Country?

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.

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The Tour · 2027–2029
September 2027American University MuseumWashington, DC
2028Lowe Art MuseumCoral Gables, Florida
2028Asheville Art MuseumAsheville, North Carolina
2029Palm Springs Art MuseumPalm Springs, California

The four museums

The Artist
Portrait of the artist Tim Tate in his studio, holding a blown glass dome topped with a winged sacred heart

Tim Tate

Born in Washington, DC in 1960, Tate came to glass in 1989 after an HIV diagnosis, to leave something behind. He co-founded the Washington Glass School and was among the first artists to seal video inside cast glass — the reliquary form that carries this exhibition.

About the artist