'Memories' in a jar

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Glass artist Tim Tate is one happy fella. Mr. Tate opened his first solo exhibit at Georgetown's Fraser Gallery yesterday. He says he created the exhibit's 19 pieces in the past four months and considers them his best work.

"I was on a roll," he says.

The glassmaker is also the new founder and co-director of the Washington Glass School, the first sculpturally based glass school in the city.

The 42-year-old artist has been so busy organizing events such as Art-O-Matic 2000, curating exhibits such as GlasStijl at the Millennium Art Center and initiating Millennium's Meltdown Glass School that he hasn't had enough time to exhibit his art.

He has shown enough, however, to gain the imprimatur of the Smithsonian Institution. Its American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery bought his "Sacred Heart of Healing" -- from his solid glass "Flaming Heart" series -- for its permanent collection. He also won the competition for the International Design Competition AIDS Monument in New Orleans. His winning "Guardian Wall" is slated for installation in 2005.

But once Fraser offered him the show -- now titled "Seized Moments ... Captured Memories" -- Mr. Tate concentrated on embellishing his "Flaming Heart" series and creating a new group named "Canopic Jars." (Used in ancient Egyptian burials, canopics are covered urns containing the internal organs of the mummified dead.)

Ever since the 1999 death of his mother, Patricia Tate, the artist has obsessively made small glass hearts -- the "flaming hearts" -- to express his intense feelings of loss.

"She died of pancreatic cancer," he says. "Before her passing, she was always there when I felt wounded. The hearts symbolize her always supportive sympathy. But the images are not only for me and my loss, they're for anyone who has gone through a heartbreaking death."

Visited this week at the Glass School near the Washington Navy Yard, the goateed, 6-foot-plus Mr. Tate was finishing three canopic jars. "I woke up at 4 a.m. with the canopic idea," he remembers. "I was so excited I got out of bed and wrote them down."