Agosto Machado Residence

History

In the late 1950s and 1960s, Agosto Machado was a self-described “street queen” in Greenwich Village, finding mutual support from other LGBT street youth on and around Christopher Street. Of Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino heritage, Machado adopted his name in 1959 by pairing the Spanish word for “August” with the last name of pioneering supermodel China Machado.

In the 1960s, the early years of the burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway theater movement, he formed close relationships with downtown theater artist Jackie Curtis and La MaMa founder Ellen Stewart. These connections were of such great significance to the young Machado that he has since referred to Curtis and Stewart as his “honorary mothers” and La MaMa as his “home” and “family.”

A Stonewall participant, Machado’s long association with downtown Manhattan has included activist causes and the avant-garde arts and theater scenes. In either 1970 or 1971, he moved into an apartment at 54 East 4th Street, on the same block as La MaMa’s then-relatively new space at no. 74. There, he made his Off-Off-Broadway debut in Curtis’s Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned (1971), starring Candy Darling.

In the early 1970s, Machado was a member of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). He helped carry its banner in the city’s first-ever Pride March and, in February 1971, became vice chairman of GAA’s news committee. That year, Kiss My Lips, Artchie, a short film about Curtis’s life starring Machado, Darling, and David Susskind, was shown at one of the popular “Firehouse Flicks” nights at GAA’s SoHo headquarters.

Machado, art historian David Getsy writes, “was both a participant in and a witness to the tumultuous histories of art, theater, and politics over the past 60 years.” At La MaMa and other venues, he became an Off-Off-Broadway fixture. In the 1980s, with the emergence of the East Village drag scene, Machado performed at Club 57 and the Pyramid, two of the neighborhood’s most popular underground nightlife venues. His large social circle included influential LGBT artists, performers, and activists such as Marsha P. Johnson, Keith Haring, Martin Wong, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar (for whom Machado was a muse), Mario Montez, Stephen Varble, Jack Smith, and frequent collaborators Curtis, Darling, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Holly Woodlawn.

The AIDS epidemic, beginning in 1981, had a devastating impact on downtown life and culture. Machado recalls attending at least one memorial a week and, for 12 years, caring for many friends living with HIV/AIDS. He also collected various items once belonging to friends who had died from the disease. From these objects and for his own private remembrance, he began making shrines and altars in his East 4th Street apartment.

Machado’s collection of mementos, programs from memorial services, newspaper clippings, photographs, matchbooks, and other ephemera has grown to reflect an array of people and places that shaped him, LGBT culture, and New York in the last decades of the 20th century. In 1992, following Johnson’s suspicious death off the west side piers, Machado and others built a shrine for her there (a “Justice for Marsha” sign from that memorial became part of Machado’s 2022 installation Shrine (White), now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art).

Machado left the East 4th Street apartment in either 1996 or 1997. His first public exhibition, Agosto Machado: The Forbidden City, was held at the Gordon Robichaux gallery in 2022. Some of his works, in addition to Shrine (White), include the 2024 pieces Ethyl (Altar); Candy, Holly, Jackie (Altar); and Downtown (Altar).

Entry by Amanda Davis, project manager (May 2025).

NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.