Lost Lovers’ Play
Pioneers Go East Collective
Lost Lovers’ Play
September 18, 2026
Gallery is open 6:30-8PM with a performance at 7PM followed by refreshments.
Address: 50 4th St, Troy, NY 12180
The public event will include an installation w/ a new film (rough cut) and a 15-minute performance featuring choreographer Stuart B Meyer. The film will include both Pioneers Go East Collective’s archival projects featuring Agosto Machado and a new film featuring Benedict Nguyen and Joey Kipp.
Project Description
Lost Lovers' Play (LLP) is a non-fiction film, performance, and experiential archival installation triptych by Pioneers Go East Collective.
Presented at Collar Works (Troy, NY) and developed at the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency in 2026, the project engages with discourses and movements within the club act art scene and the downtown experimental theatre scene in New York City, beginning in the 1970s, a pivotal era for LGBTQ+ awareness and artistic militancy.
Reflecting on the legacy of forgotten pioneering voices in the underground art scene, this heartfelt creative and archival project centers on the lived experiences of Agosto Machado (1938-2026), a downtown Gay icon, drag performance artist, and witness to the Stonewall Uprising. Agosto’s contributions to LGBTQ+ history are significant, and the film LLP captures firsthand anecdotes and humorous impressions about the vibrant downtown NYC art scene.
Agosto was a dear collaborator of Pioneers Go East Collective for close to a decade. Pioneers Go East Collective interviewed Agosto and featured him in a series of performances and short films starting in 2017. The project weaves recorded stories about platonic friendships and sexual encounters with fictionalized and joyous recreations of performances Agosto participated in. In ongoing conversations with Agosto, Pioneers Go East Collective features the artist's feelings without any filters to reshape a fantastical space that breaks the linear reading of his journey, enriching the narrative while celebrating otherness and desire as part of a creative process of discovery.
Lost Lovers' Play (LLP) is collaboratively conceived by Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte (filmmaker/ archival research, visual installation), bree breeden and Kathleen Kelley (cinematographers/editors), Philip Treviño and Mark Tambella (designers), and features performance artists and choreographers: Benedict Nguyen, Joey Kipp, and Stuart B Meyers. The project includes video and audio recordings featuring Agosto Machado (recorded performance artist) in Pioneers Go East Collective’s projects.
In Lost Lovers' Play, we are diving into the camp aesthetic that defined the drag and performance art movements, juxtaposed with interview film style to deepen our queer sensibility. The intention for this new project is to positively redefine ourselves and our trajectories, something very hard to grasp within our society. Presented in partnership with Collar Works, the project will take shape as an intimate and tactile media installation that allows viewers to enter his world through a first-person narrative film, along with Agosto’s anecdotal narration audio recordings, recreating some of the stages he performed on over the decades, to invite the viewers to experience his story firsthand.
Ultimately, we are building a shape-shifting film intersecting documentary and fantastical recreation of real events. We aim to build a film that celebrates the joy of LGBTQ+ identity and its capacity to dismantle broken structures and imagine new futures. We argue for a distinctly Queer imagining, one that oozes joy, sensuality, connection, and imagination.
Bio and Mission - Pioneers Go East Collective is a radical queer laboratory collective of performing and visual artists, curators and social practitioners dedicated to time-based and media art to empower the LGBTQ+ experience. Since 2012 based in New York City, we create works of high artistic merit, speak out about social issues and build a platform to positively impact the LGBTQ+ community. Founded and led by Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Daniel Diaz, and Philip Treviño, in collaboration with Joey Kipp, ALEXA GRÆ, Anabella Lenzu, Mark Tambella, Remi Harris, Joyce Isabelle, Sugar Vendil, and syd island, the collective portrays same-gender-loving experiences, memory, and marginalization that resonate with contemporary lives. Pioneers Go East Collective combines stories of vulnerability and courage with popular culture to facilitate communal meaning and advocate for cultural integrity.
Pioneers Go East Collective’s work has been developed in residencies and presented in New York City at Socrates Sculpture Park (2025/26), La MaMa Moves (2026 & 2024), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music’s residency in 2023), BRIC ARTS MEDIA (2022/23), The LGBT Center (2019-24), Judson Church (2018-26), Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (2018-19), Center for Performance Research (2021-23), JACK (2018), La MaMa (2012-26), St Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab (2014), Governors Island/ Process Residency LMCC (2013/14), Chashama Gallery (2012), Goethe Institute Gallery (2012); and Upstate NY at Lumberyard (Catskill, NY) in 2023, Collar Works (Troy, NY) in 2023, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency (2024 & 2026), Kaatsbaan Cultural Park (Tivoli, NY) in 2024, and Time Space Limited (Hudson, NY) in 2018 & 2025. Current collaborators: Symara Sarai, Darrin Wright, Benedict Nguyen, Stuart Meyers, joy burklund, Adele Overbey, bree breeden, and Kathleen Kelley. www.pioneersgoeast.org
Upcoming
Bodies and Minds
Anna Nickman and Sophia Rothberg
September 25–October 23
Artist Reception: October 3, 3-5PM
Bodies and Minds brings together the work of Anna Nickman and Sophia Rothberg in an exploration of the body as both a physical form and a site of memory, perception, vulnerability, and transformation. Across painting, photography, sculpture, collage, and digital media, the artists examine the complicated relationship between inhabiting a body and understanding oneself through it.
Nickman challenges the expectations and judgements imposed upon the female body, using distortion, texture, and surreal imagery to give physical form to experiences of discomfort, resilience, and self-acceptance. Rothberg draws from her lived experience with chronic illness, using self-portraiture, fragmentation, and reconstruction to explore shifts in identity, memory, and the relationship between body and mind.
Together, their works resist the idea of the body as fixed or easily understood. Instead, Bodies and Minds considers embodiment as an ongoing process, one shaped by what we feel internally, what the world projects onto us, and the ways we continually reconstruct our understanding of ourselves.
Join us at 50 4th Street Studios on October 3rd from 3-5PM for an artist reception and celebration.
Anna Nickman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, and digital media. Raised in New York City, she was introduced to art at an early age by her mother, a graphic designer, through creative projects and frequent visits to the city’s museums and exhibitions. Nickman earned a B.A. from Union College, where she double majored in Visual Arts and Economics. Her engagement with these seemingly distinct disciplines fostered an interest in the ways different forms of knowledge, materials, and processes can intersect, a perspective that continues to inform her artistic practice.
Sophia Rothberg is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, and digital media. She has a B.A. in Visual Arts from Union College in Schenectady, New York. Rothberg is a recipient of several awards, grants, and publications, including the Arnold Bittleman Memorial Prize, the Charles Alexander Richmond Prize in Fine Arts, and an education grant to study 19th-century photography at the Morgan Library. Her work has also been exhibited throughout New York, including Crowell and West Galleries, LARAC Latham Gallery, and Saratoga Arts. Through her work, she seeks to capture the significance found in the subtle details of everyday life, as well as the striking presence of the unusual, inviting viewers to see the world from a fresh perspective.