Agosto Machado. Photograph by Scott Rossi.

Agosto Machado’s apartment and studio on East Third Street is crammed, floor to ceiling, with steel bookcases bursting with books and boxes of files. Colorful printed fabrics are draped over the shelves, concealing most of their contents. In the areas left exposed, there are framed photographs of icons like the Warhol muse Candy Darling and the gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson, arranged around candles and trinkets as if to form small devotional altars. The space is small, but Machado welcomed me in on a late April day. He had laid out a bottle of Evian for me, and a packet of Pepperidge Farm butter cookies. He had rolled his bedroll into the bathtub to make space for us to talk. I gestured at the fabrics hanging over the shelves to ask if they’re for privacy. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s aesthetic. Like makeup.”

A Chinese Spanish Filipino American orphan raised on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, he befriended and eventually influenced multiple generations of downtown artists, among them Jack Smith, Peter Hujar, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Machado, who doesn’t share his age (“A lady never tells,” he said), has been a witness to decades of cultural moments in New York: the experimental theater of the early sixties, Warhol’s factory, the Stonewall riot, the AIDS epidemic, the gentrification of downtown Manhattan. He is eager to be of use as an oral historian—to evoke, as his art does, the lives of the artists he has known, many of whom were lost to AIDS. He has always collected the world around him, accumulating protest pins and street flyers, photographs, funeral notices, bits of gems and glitter, a pair of Candy Darling’s shoes. In recent years, Machado has begun delving through his archives to create shrines and altars, like the ones that appear in his portfolio in The Paris Review’s recent Spring issue.

Photograph by Scott Rossi.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve been described as a performance artist, a “Zelig-like icon,” a muse, an activist, and an archivist. It’s difficult to define you, but you define yourself most often as a “pre-Stonewall street queen.” What does that mean to you?

AGOSTO MACHADO

It came out of the happenstance of not having a regular place to live when I was young. For street queens, your world is your street. Where do you get information? In person, on the street. People would say to each other, Did you hear that place was raided? Do you know who just died? Do you know who’s in the hospital? Do you know who got picked up in Bellevue? And so forth. I was nobody and I had no place to live. I was dependent on the kindness of strangers. That’s a quote from Tennessee Williams. And there were people who, even if all they had was a bag of potato chips, they would share it.

INTERVIEWER

For The Paris Review, you titled your portfolio Downtown (Altar). Can you tell me about the two pieces by Gilda Pervin? One is a pin, and the other is a rectangular sculpture. They’re made of colorful clay, with bits of wire and marbles and beads stuck into them. How did they come into your possession?

MACHADO

Gilda Pervin is ninety-one years old now. She came to New York when she was forty-six. She was married and she had children. She wanted to express herself. I had started working with Ethyl Eichelberger, who lived on Spring and Elizabeth. Where the Elizabeth Street Garden is now, there was a vacant lot where people threw garbage and what have you. But on a window ledge nearby, there was an accumulation of these objects. Someone had taken the time to put them there. That was Gilda Pervin. I said, “Whoever this artist is, I hope to eventually meet her.” And those are the pieces she gave me. For forty-five years, I have moved them around in different installations. And now, they’re part of an altar, which is really a shrine. It’s going to be in the museum as one piece. Read More