“There is safety in numbers,” Agosto Machado has said about the queer and trans street youth that were his community in the 1960s. They found each other in the streets of New York City, offering mutual support, friendship, and a degree of safety. Defying the expectations of who they were told to be, Machado and his fellow “street queens” created new possibilities for each other. Especially at that time, anyone queer, trans, or even wearing clothing divergent from their assigned gender was vulnerable to violence, police harassment, and social and legal discrimination. However, Machado and his friends found more freedom and security when they were together. The lessons he learned from this time of survival led him to social and collaborative performance, theater, art, and activism.
A constant figure in the culture of Downtown Manhattan, Machado was both a participant in and a witness to the tumultuous histories of art, theater, and politics over the past 60 years. He was present at the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 and became a fixture of Off-Off-Broadway theater. He was an actress, a muse, and a street presence. In the 1980s and 1990s, he took on the task of caring for and remembering his friends and others who experienced the devastation of the AIDS crisis. When others would not, Machado supported those who were being neglected, bringing them his laughter and love. Throughout these episodes, Machado has believed that magic happens when people bond together and suspend their disbelief in all they have been told is impossible. Together, they imagined a better place and time—even in the face of cruelty, prejudice, neglect, and death.
Machado grew up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, an orphan of Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino descent, and moved to Greenwich Village (and later the East Village) in the late 1950s. After establishing himself among the energetic and eclectic community of performers, actors, and artists in the Downtown scene, he came to play roles in the historic Off-Off-Broadway productions at the Caffe Cino, John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous, and Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. He moved through Andy Warhol’s Factory, the Angels of Light (a splinter group from San Francisco’s Cockettes), Jack Smith’s films, performance artist Jackie Curtis’s plays, Peter Hujar’s photographs, Stephen Varble’s costume performances, and the Pyramid Club, and he was a frequent collaborator of drag performance artist Ethel Eichelberger and actress Candy Darling. He was a witness to some of the most vibrant, rebellious, and unique parts of New York’s history.
Many of these friends appear in Machado’s Shrine, in which objects, images, possessions, and obituaries are brought together as a testament. For decades, Machado has created such domestic shrines from mementos and fragments in a private practice of remembrance, and only recently have these been exhibited publicly as artworks. He started with the idea of making a collage of images of friends who died of AIDS, but it became too many, too fast. Instead, the piles of clippings, the treasured remnants, and the shared objects overtake the shelves of the Shrine—its own little museum. Machado’s unique history in the Downtown scene allows works such as Shrine to hold some of the most important stories in contemporary art and theater, each told as a friend’s loss. Included are the famous and the not-so-famous, and Machado knows that the specifics of each person’s life will fade with each successive generation of viewers. Even in the future, when the individuals are forgotten, he reminds us that the Shrine will remain a portrait of a community that changed the world by making life possible for each other. “It’s all-inclusive, because my work is my circle of friends who sustained me during very difficult times,” Machado explained. “The most positive things are the wonderful times we had together. I do not grieve those awful experiences of death…. I can witness the transition with celebration because you’re moving on to the next life.”
There remains little writing about Machado’s life and work, but much of his history has been conveyed through the many interviews he has given. Some of the most useful are listed below. He has also appeared in documentaries and books about his collaborators, such as Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Jack Smith, and Candy Darling. (In addition, research was based on the author’s own interview with Machado on September 2, 2016, and on the oral history conducted by The Museum of Modern Art on January 10, 2024.)
Oral history interviews conducted by Sarah Tolan-Mee for the Performing Arts Legacy Project (October 24, November 7, and December 5, 2016).
“Become Part of the Universe so the Universe Becomes Part of You,” interview by Jimmy Paul and Tabboo!, C*NDY 11 (2018), 40-56.
Interview by Sally Plass for Off-Center: The Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project, July 31, 2019
Interview by August Bernadicou for the LGBTQ History Project, August 5, 2020
Interview by Conrad Ventur for Visual AIDS and Gordon Robichaux, March 8, 202.
Interview by Tourmaline for MoMA Magazine, November 30, 2022
David Getsy, art historian, 2024
