Past

Gordon Robichaux is honored to present Agosto Machado: The Forbidden City, an exhibition of Machado’s collections of artwork and ephemera, and a group of shrine-like installations shown here for the first time outside of his apartment. A singular figure, Machado is a Chinese-Spanish-Filipino-American performance artist, activist, archivist, muse, caretaker, and friend to countless celebrated and underground visual and performing artists. He has been a vital participant and witness to cultural and creative life in New York since the early sixties from art, theater, performance, and film to social and political counterculture and the dawn of the gay liberation movement. He has performed with Jack Smith, Ethyl Eichelberger, Stephen Varble, Angels of Light, and The Cockettes, as well as Warhol superstars Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Mario Montez, and Jackie Curtis. He has been a muse for generations of artists including Peter Hujar, Jack Pierson, Tabboo!, Collier Schorr, Alice O’Malley, and Ryan McGinley; a collector of his myriad friends’ work, including the art of Arch Connelly, Gilda Pervin, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Uzi Parnes, Ken Tisa, and Martin Wong; self-taught East Village street artists; and part of a 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 profound experience of the AIDS crisis, which, in its early days, devastated his Downtown arts community and took the lives 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 each announcement, program, and card, 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, Machado has amassed an extraordinary collection, a kind of lost world, that documents his own life and the wider creative history of Downtown New York. 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 is a way of life, of constituting his own Gesamtkunstwerk: paper ephemera and photographs fill bookcases, cover memory boards, or are stacked in high piles; prized objects are lovingly arranged and displayed in jars, on shelves and tables, or tenderly wrapped in scraps of newspaper and paper towels and stored in boxes.

For the exhibition at Gordon Robichaux, a group of Machado’s installations will be presented alongside artworks and ephemera from his collections. Highlights include a box of Jack Smith’s performance props, a group of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s glittering foil reliquary objects, examples of Arch Connelly’s jeweled paintings and collage, two Martin Wong paintings of brick walls, and works by self-taught artists including Tomata du Plenty and others associated with the East Village, such as Caroline Goe, Grady Alexis, Miguel “Mickie” Perez, and Sir Shadow. Two shrines in bookcases are composed of carefully arranged photographs and relics of Jack Smith, Ethyl Eichelberger, Mario Montez, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, Peter Hujar, Ellen Stewart, Marsha P. Johnson, and Taylor Mead, surrounded by Mexican skeleton figurines and artificial flowers.