Peter Agostini's 12th Street Studio, as Photographed by David Carrow

For most of the 1960’s, Peter Agostini had a studio on 12^th Street in Manhattan, between Avenues B and C.  In the early 70’s, he purchased a building on Greene Street in Soho, and the12th Street studio was left unused for several years.

David Carrow, who was a student of Agostini’s at the New York Studio School, and later, his graduate assistant at UNC Greensboro, remembers telling Agostini he wanted to photograph the old studio before it was cleared out.  “The place had become sort of a tomb," he told me recently.  "It was very quiet and dusty.  There was no activity in there, which was so interesting.  I remember just saying, I gotta get in here and take some pictures because this is just fantastic with the light coming in on all the plaster and just the kind of decay and deterioration that was there, because nobody had been moving things around for a while.”

The resulting photographs, 20 in number, show the studio as it stood sometime in the early 70’s.  Agostini worked mostly in plaster during his years on 12^th Street, making many of his famous swells, cast balloons, drapery and found objects, and these pieces can be seen as they sat on that day, abandoned and in disrepair, covered in dust, beautifully lit by a combination of natural light and fluorescents.

The studio space measured 125 by 25 feet, with concrete floors, a sink, one skylight and a four-burner stove, the only source of heat.  Eventually the building, across the street from Public School 61, was condemned and became a parking lot.  Where the pieces in the photos are today is unknown, as is the exact date these photographs were made.


See more of these photos on our Flickr page.

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Learn more about Peter Agostini on his profile.