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 drawing and stop-motion animation, and most recently working with glass as the studio coordinator at Washington Glass School.

In 2019, Arden received her MA in Stop-Motion Animation from BAU College of Arts & Design Barcelona, where she collaborated on award-winning animations with an international team of artists. Her thesis film, “Unraveled,” spent the following two years as an official selection of film festivals around the world. Arden has accumulated both independent and formal training in observational drawing and realism, including a study of trompe l'oeil in 2015. In 2024, Arden served as a site manager and key holder for the first post-pandemic Artomatic exhibition in downtown DC, where she showed a retrospective of black & white hyper-realistic drawings. Arden has worked extensively in graphite and charcoal since 2016, and in the last couple of years she has been incorporating more color into her work, experimenting with soft pastel and dry pigment, to achieve delicately blended, rich, matte color ways that explore how light and negative space define reality. Arden participated in the Winter 2025 Pentaculum at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, where she started drawing on a grander scale for the first time, and with full emphasis on color application. 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 (b. 1992, Fort Walton Beach, FL) is a visual artist based in Washington, D.C. They work in acrylic and sculptural mediums as well as digital illustration. Corbin grew up in Northwest Florida and earned their BA in Studio Art & International Affairs from Florida State University in 2013. Before settling in D.C. in 2017, Corbin was a teacher in South Korea and Thailand then moved to St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. to pursue a career in the wine industry. When their winemaking career took a sharp turn at the start of the 2020 pandemic, Corbin began creating again after a ten year hiatus from earning their art degree. Corbin’s work is a colorful extension of their journey exploring gender identity, queer representation, their southern roots, and the beauty of unlearning. Their work has been included in exhibitions at Umbrella Art Fair, Touchstone Gallery, Hera Gallery RI, Playhaus, The Katzen Arts Center, Washington Studio School and Rhizome. In July 2024, Corbin featured their first solo exhibition at Thundershark Gallery in DC.

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.

Tina Villadolid Existing in a liminal space of being the colonized and the colonizer, Tina Villadolid’s creative practice seeks both healing and accountability for her paradoxical inheritances as a Filipina American. Through temporal, action-based work she calls “ritual interventions,” Tina embodies generational resilience to enduring legacies of American control and oppression at sites where Philippine histories are present, yet diminished or erased. By situating common and organic objects within her work, she plays at questioning imperialist regimes of value. A practice of reclamation, Tina physicalizes a power shift through subversion of materials, form, and language.

In 2023, Tina graduated with an MFA in Social Practice from George Washington University. She was the recipient of the Nashman Center Prize for Community Engagement and the award for Outstanding MFA Work in Social Practice. She was in the inaugural cohort of the CARD Fellowship, a partnership of The Nicholson Project, the DC Public Library, and the Phillips Collection. In 2024, Tina fulfilled a Mary G. Stange Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and a University Fellowship Residency at MASS MoCA. She made a ritual intervention at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the opening festival of Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond. Her work has been shown at Goethe-Institut and Phillips@THEARC in Washington DC, was commissioned by Related Tactics and Visibility Project for Nourishing Power at Edge on the Square in San Francisco, and appears on the cover of the Filipino American National Historical Society Journal 2024.

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.

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 an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her work has been shown in various galleries in the DMV and Philadelphia area including Katzen Art Center, Maryland Art Place, Target Gallery, and IA&A Hillyer. Her work has been reviewed and included in various publications, including the Washington Post and Baltimore City Paper.

 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. 

Diana Baird N’Diaye

Geoffrey Bowton