Mixed-media installation, with jewelry, pins, and textiles; plastic, metal, glass, and papier-mâché objects; photographs, postcards, paper mask, protest sign, memorial-service cards and programs, and newspaper and magazine clippings; and original artworks by Scott Covert, Ken Angel Davis with CAConrad, and Gene Fedorko with Stephen Tashjian (Tabboo!)
Downtown New York has hosted generations of underground cultural communities, providing a vibrant home for drag queens, theater performers, filmmakers, and outcasts. Performance artist and queer liberation activist Machado has been a long-standing figure in these scenes. Over five decades, he’s amassed a large collection of art and ephemera from the city’s counterculture, which he assembles into shrines. Many of these objects memorialize losses he has experienced—some due to street violence against queer folks, others due to federally sanctioned negligence during the AIDS crisis. “It’s really ancestor worship, my gratitude for all these people who came through my life,” Machado has explained.
2024
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Zine
Short for “magazine,” a zine is a self-published booklet created with a DIY (do it yourself) ethic. Usually made in small batches by nonprofessional publishers, zines have historically been used to spread countercultural or “underground” ideas, like punk culture and activist politics.
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In the Shadow of the American Dream
Gallery 202In 1980s New York, artists produced work from the front lines of an embattled social landscape marked by urban desolation, financial precarity, and the AIDS epidemic.
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