E22: Glass for
Social justice
Transformer’s Annual Exercises for Emerging Artists
July 26 - September 6, 2025
Featured Artists:
Arden Colley, C.S. Corbin, Tina Villadolid, Nilou Kazemzadeh
Lead Mentor: Tim Tate
VISIONARY LEADERS CIRCLE PREVIEW: Friday, July 25 | 5 - 7 PM
OPENING RECEPTION & ARTIST TALK: Saturday, July 26 | 12 - 6 PM
This years’ rendition of Exercises for Emerging Artists, Glass for Social Justice, will be ten sessions over four months at the Washington Glass School learning deep relief dry plaster casting with Tim Tate. At the end of the course, all work created in this mentorship will be presented in a group show at Transformer with the rest of the cohort.
For this 22nd year of the program, the Exercises will focus on glass, specifically deep relief dry plaster casting. This is a great method to interact with glass with very little training and huge breadth on what can be accomplished. The mentorship program will consist of 10, two and a half hour sessions on Thursday evenings starting April 17 and running through June 26. During the course of the mentorship sessions, the participating artists will both learn from invited peer mentors about best practices, as well as get insight on developing a work or project to be presented as part of a summer exhibition at Transformer. The culminating exhibition will take place July 26 and run through September 6, 2025.
Tim will teach the process of deep relief glass casting. This is a kiln-forming technique that creates detailed, three-dimensional raised images in glass by pressing an object into dry powder, then slumping glass into the negative space. By the end of the program, you will have nine 12” x 12” pieces that will be displayed in a grid formation at Transformer. The subject of the project is up to you. You will choose a social justice issue you want to speak to, and focus on this topic over the duration of the program.
The Washington Glass School, founded in 2001 by DC artists Tim Tate and Erwin Timmers, is a unique educational program in the Nation’s Capital area, operating as the sculptural glass education, artistic and community center and resource for the mid-Atlantic region, serving students, artists and the general public. It encourages research and exploration of new techniques in all aspects of glass as well as other media such as steel, ceramics, lighting and concrete. Our goal is to introduce artists in other media to the depth, processes and joys of glass to enhance their work.
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”.
participating artists
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.
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.
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.
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.