Radical botany and a queer gilded age are on view at the Alice Austen House

Before Diane Arbus and Vivian Maier and Berenice Abbott and Helen Levitt, there was Alice Austen. Born in 1866 in Staten Island, Austen was one of the first and most prolific female photographers, leaving behind a trove of nearly 8,000 images when she died in 1952. The self-taught photographer was given a camera by her uncle at age 10 and built out a tiny darkroom in a second-floor closet of her family’s home. The pictures she took nearly every day, of rag pickers and handcarts and egg sellers and messengers and even the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, offer a rare photojournalistic lens on New York City during the Gilded Age. But it’s Austen’s photographs of her friends and neighbours—posing on her lawn in bathing costumes, lined up in bustle skirts on bicycles, playing tennis and poker, lounging in bed, and vamping in drag—that continue to resonate. That’s partly because they often challenged rigid Victorian mores (Austen didn’t conceal the fact that she was a lesbian and lived with her longtime partner, Gertrude Tate), but also because their casual intimacy and quotidian simplicity, despite the laborious effort they required (photo equipment could weigh upwards of 50 pounds), share much in common with the images we snap on our iPhones every day more than 150 years later.

Photo: Collection of Historic Richmond Town

Photo: Collection of Historic Richmond Town

Photo: Collection of Historic Richmond Town

At The Alice Austen House, the hilltop Victorian cottage in Staten Island overlooking New York’s harbour that was her childhood home and is now a National Historical Landmark, a new generation is discovering her after decades of relative obscurity. After the stock-market crash left Austen and Tate destitute, they were evicted from their home. Austen ended up in a farm colony, but not before donating her life’s work. “She knew that her photographs were really important and gave her entire collection to the Staten Island Historical Society, and while they preserved them, they were not believers in her truthful story,” says Victoria Munro, executive director at the Alice Austen House. “This kind of closeting plus being a woman plus dying very impoverished meant that Alice has not been accepted into the canon of what is considered the really important photographers of the day.”

Linder, Parade, 2025

The exhibits that Munro brings to the Alice Austen House are meant to right that course. “I’m always trying to bridge the gap between contemporary artists and Alice because there are so many threads in her work that are really relevant today,” says Munro. With the new group exhibition "Radical Botany: The Politics of Flowers"  co-curated by Susan Bright and Hedy Van Erp, there’s a clear conversation between the art on display and Austen’s own, which is always scattered throughout the space. Works by Pipilotti Rist, Tracy Morgan, Kara Walker, Justine Kurland, and Remsen Wolff, among others, probe domesticity and queerness via flowers. “Flowers are often thought of as being purely decorative and pretty, but they are potent symbols of so much more, and the show makes you reengage with that,” says Munro. Here, flowers—arranged, deconstructed, sprouting, wilting, decaying—are ecological vehicles for addressing deeper issues like gender politics, class, and racism; they are objects of beauty and tools of resistance too.

Kara Walker, Breadfruit, 2022–2023, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper

The lush gardens surrounding the Alice Austen House reveal its namesake’s other passion. Austen, who was also founder of the Staten Island Garden Club, was, like many Victorian-era women, encouraged to garden. It happened to be something women could do without a male chaperone. “When you look at the history of female landscape designers, they’re mostly gay,” Munro adds. Austen’s gardening legacy is being carried on in the new century with the property’s Queer Ecologies Garden. Conceived in partnership with the New York Restoration Project and students at Pratt, the garden is designed to challenge, botanically speaking at least, heteronormativity. “It’s filled with plants that are nonbinary, self-seeding, intersex, and symbolically queer, like lavender and pansies,” says Munro, adding that wisteria grown in it hangs on the wall of the “Radical Botany” show. “Nature can be affirming, and diversity in nature can carry over.”

 

Besides queer plants, Munro points out that gardens have also long been a space for cruising and sexual encounters. For Austen, the garden was a place of freedom and independence at a time when much of her life, as a queer woman, had to be lived within the narrow margins dictated by the era. When she was growing up in this picturesque cottage, it was known as “Clear Comfort,” and the name is apt; the garden, both then and now, is radical, but it’s also a refuge. And that, says Munro, is courting a new wave of young queer visitors, who are seeking out community, different experiences (one ferry ride and you’re a world away from the city), and a richer understanding of pre-Stonewall history. Munro’s mission now is ensuring that Austin’s name, her work, and that of her contemporaries is acknowledged and given a place to flourish. As the famous protest slogan that opens “Radical Botany” reads: “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Justine Kurland, Nudes (Bad Mommy), 2023, collage, razors, excerpt

This article is originally from harperbazaar.com in June 2026

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