Agosto Machado (c. 1938 – March 21, 2026) was a central figure in Downtown New York performance culture: actor, street survivor, archivist, and artist. Orphaned in Hell’s Kitchen and raised in institutions, he became a street queen in his teens, surviving through improvisation and resilience. During these years he met Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. He adopted the name Agosto Machado, taking the surname from model China Machado. He soon became active in the Gay Liberation movement.
Machado began performing in 1972 in Jackie Curtis’s Amerika Cleopatra. This launched a long association with Downtown theater and artists including John Vaccaro, Jeff Weiss, H. M. Koutoukas, Harvey Fierstein, John Jesurun, and the Hot Peaches. He obsessively preserved the photographs, flyers, costumes, and ephemera of this vanishing world, calling his practice “ancestor worship.” From them he created shrine-like memorials that transformed Downtown ephemera into enduring cultural history, works embraced by the art world in his last few years, collected by Museum of Modern Art, and included in the Whitney Biennial, which opened 13 days before his passing.
