Agosto Machado

Gordon Robichaux is honored to present a Positions booth at Art Basel Miami Beach dedicated to the work of Agosto Machado, a Chinese Spanish Filipino American performance artist, activist, archivist, muse, and caretaker to countless celebrated and underground visual and performing artists. The presentation is anchored by Machado’s shrine-like works, which he carefully
assembles on shelves, boards, and in cabinets incorporating artworks, photographs, and relics of memory and history from his vast archives—a kind of lost world that documents his own life and the wider creative history of downtown New York. Inspired by our 2022 exhibition of Machado’s work, and as an extension of the shrines, the installation includes stand-alone
artworks, ephemera, and mementos from the artist’s collections memorializing his creative milieu.

Highlights within the shrines and installation include a box of Jack Smith’s performance props; an installation of personal snapshots and memorial cards for those lost to AIDS; Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s glittering reliquary objects; Arch Connelly’s jeweled works; Peter Hujar’s photographs of Machado and his peers; Panels from Martin Wong’s graffiti collection; works by self-taught artists and artists associated with the East Village, such as Caroline Goe and
“Mickie” Perez; and personal effects and mementos from Ethyl Eichelberger, Mario Montez, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Ellen Stewart, Marsha P. Johnson, and Taylor Mead.

Machado has been a vital participant in and witness to cultural and creative life in New York since the early sixties. A key figure in art, theater, performance, and film, his presence within social and political countercultural currents and at the dawn of the gay liberation movement is deeply felt. He has performed with Jack Smith, Ethyl Eichelberger, Stephen Varble, Angels of
Light, and the Cockettes, as well as with Warhol superstars Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Mario Montez, and Jackie Curtis. He has been a muse for generations of photographers including Peter Hujar, Jack Pierson, and Collier Schorr; a collector of work by his many friends, including the art of Arch Connelly, Gilda Previn, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Uzi Parnes, Ken Tisa, Martin Wong, and self-taught East Village street artists; and part of the cohort of queer revolutionaries, including Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, with whom he participated in the Stonewall Rebellion.

From the beginning of his time living downtown, Machado felt a profound responsibility to preserve and memorialize his creative community. His acute sense of duty and care is informed by his deep appreciation of the marginal and ephemeral reality of queer and underground creative production and his intimate experience of the AIDS crisis, which, in its early days, devastated his downtown arts community and took the life of many of his close friends. In the face of this immeasurable loss, Machado nursed scores of friends and faithfully attended funerals and memorials, saving programs and cards, many of which feature photographs of their beloved faces. Over the decades, he preserved invites, posters, and flyers from exhibitions and performances he participated in or attended, and collected artwork—“treasures and souvenirs
from friendships”—acquired as gifts, through trades and inheritance, or found and bought on the streets of New York.

Through his decades of activity, he has amassed an extraordinary collection. These artifacts have been on permanent display as an immersive installation in Machado’s intimate East Village apartment—a museum, shrine, and archive he affectionately calls “The Forbidden City” after the legendary palace in Peking. His collecting and archiving are a way of life—his own Gesamtkunstwerk in which paper ephemera and photographs fill bookcases, cover memory boards, or are stacked in high piles; and prized objects are lovingly arranged and displayed in jars, on shelves, or tenderly wrapped in scraps of paper towels and stored in boxes.