This text is a part of Hyperallergic’s 2025 Pleasure Month collection, spotlighting moments from New York’s LGBTQ+ artwork historical past all through June.
On the shoreline of Staten Island, the place the Atlantic makes its means between Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey, kids’s playful shouts populated the in any other case peaceable greenery outdoors the Alice Austen Home Museum on a Tuesday afternoon in early Could. Zoe Tirado, the museum’s schooling director, advised Hyperallergic that the group of youngsters was visiting from an LGBTQ+ membership at a neighborhood elementary faculty.
The house-turned-museum was as soon as the residence of Alice Austen, who defied gender roles as one of many first American girls photographers to work outdoors of a studio, capturing the younger Victorian and immigrant girls of New York Metropolis.
View of the Alice Austen Home Museum exterior (photograph Isa Farfan/Hyperallergic)
An indication describes the historic significance of the house. (photograph Isa Farfan/Hyperallergic)
Austen’s black-and-white images depicted what she described because the “larky life” of middle-class Victorian girls — wearing drag, sleeping in the identical mattress, and showing as if they had been about to kiss. Austen moved together with her household into the idyllic waterfront house, which they known as “Clear Comfort,” in 1866, when she was an toddler. In 1917, Austen was joined by Gertrude Tate, a instructor who would turn into her associate of 55 years.
Alice Austen, “The Darned Club” (1891)
Munro mentioned that the return of images will broaden public entry to some 7,500 photos taken by Austen over the course of her profession.
“The house was a muse for Alice. It’s poignant for the works to come home to an institution that recognizes and centers her truthful identity and life story,” Munro mentioned, including that she is grateful for the historic society’s longtime stewardship.
On the telephone, Munro teared up talking in regards to the repatriation, which she mentioned she labored to realize for over seven years.
“As a lesbian woman myself and an artist, it’s just so important,” Munro mentioned.
An LGBTQ+ Pleasure flag flies outdoors the Alice Austen Home in Staten Island. (photograph Isa Farfan/Hyperallergic)
Contained in the Staten Island house (photograph Isa Farfan/Hyperallergic)
At house, Tate and Austen lived what Munro described as an “out life,” placing each of their names on the high of their letterhead. Relics representing Austen’s on a regular basis life, together with a staged front room and a miniature mannequin of her darkroom, had been reconstructed primarily based on photos that Austen took of the home’s inside whereas she lived there, Tirado advised Hyperallergic. The quaint house museum additionally devotes house to a group of images of immigrant road staff in Manhattan, the place she commuted from Clear Consolation.
These images, printed in 1896 by the Albertype Firm, put Austen on the map as one of many first girls road photographers. Austen was scouted by the US Public Well being Service to seize immigrant quarantine facilities, the place ship passengers getting into the nation had been anticipated to attend in an effort to curb the unfold of contagious illnesses. The pictures had been reproduced in Harper’s Weekly Journal and proven on the 1901 Pan-American Exposition.
Austen’s “Trude & I Masked” (1891)
When the inventory market crashed in 1929, catalyzing the Nice Despair within the Thirties, Austen and Tate might now not afford the residence. The couple took out a mortgage on the home, nevertheless it was foreclosed on only some years later. Regardless of monetary troubles, they remained within the house as renters, paying $10 a month till a brand new purchaser evicted them in 1945. That yr, Austen gave nearly all of her images to the Staten Island Historic Society, now often called Historic Richmond City.
By the mid-Nineteen Sixties, the home was slated for demolition, however was saved when New York Metropolis took title of the land to create a future museum after a push from fellow photographers.
For Munro, the return of Austen’s works throughout Pleasure Month, amid mounting assaults on queer communities in the US, represents a glimmer of hope.
“The switch marks a pivotal second — not just for our establishment, however for the broader cultural panorama — at a time when LGBTQ+ communities face renewed threats of erasure, Munro mentioned.
Austen captured Victorian girls as they subverted gender roles. (photograph Isa Farfan/Hyperallergic)
