Photos By Gail

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 Agosto Machado has been a long-standing figure in these scenes. Over five decades, he has amassed a large collection of art and ephemera from the city’s counterculture, which he assembles into shrines, such as the one seen above.

Many of these objects, memorialize losses he has experienced personally – some due to street violence against queer people, others due to federally sanctioned negligence during the AIDS crisis. “It’s really [about] ancestor worship, my gratitude for all these people who came through my life,” Machado has explained.

Machado’s 2022 mixed media installation, Shrine (White), is composed of  jewelry, pins, textiles, plastic, metal, glass and papier-mache objects, exhibition copies of photographs, postcards, a paper mask, a protest sign, memorial service cards and progams, newspaper and magazine clippings, and original art by Scott Covert, Ken Angel Davis with CAConrad, and Gene Fedorko with Stephen Tahshjian (Tabboo!) Individuals referenced in this piece include activist Marsha P. Johnson and Warhol’s Factory Actress, Candy Darling.

Photographed in The Museum of Modern Art in NYC