An Evening with Alice Austen and Her Home (Online)

Join Victoria Munro for a virtual talk exploring the life and legacy of pioneering photographer Alice Austen and the enduring significance of her home, the Alice Austen House. Munro will reflect on Austen’s role as both a trailblazing photographer and a steward of one of Staten Island’s most iconic homes—now recognized as a historic site and gathering place with deep cultural resonance.

The talk will consider the experience of visiting the house as an encounter with the feeling of home: not only as a physical place, but as an emotional and historical space where personal stories are carefully held and shared. Within these rooms and surrounding landscapes, where Austen staged many of her most celebrated photographs, visitors often experience a powerful sense of time collapsing, presence lingering in light, shadow, and memory.

For the LGBTQ+ community, the site carries particular significance. Long contested and ultimately affirmed as a space of belonging, the museum today stands as a living testament to visibility and recognition. As a leader in LGBTQ+ interpretation at historic sites, the Alice Austen House continues to demonstrate how history is not static, but alive, inviting new voices, perspectives, and stories to be heard.

Speaker

Victoria Munro, born in Wellington, New Zealand, is an artist, educator, writer, and curator whose multifaceted practice bridges sculpture, public art, and cultural leadership. Munro is the Executive Director and Curator of the Alice Austen House Museum, where she stewards a site of LGBTQ+ visibility and storytelling. She also serves as Board President of the Museums Council of New York City and sits on both the Executive Leadership Committee of the NYC Parks and Open Spaces Coalition and the National Trust’s Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios Program. As founder of the Queer Ecologies Garden Project at Alice Austen Park, Munro fuses environmental activism with queer theory, cultivating a living, evolving space that reimagines relationships between identity, land, and community. Her work—across sculpture, curation, and ecological practice—champions queer presence in both natural and institutional spaces.

This lecture is part of the program In the Spirit of Tara: A Celebration of Five Women Who Left a Lasting Legacy – Dorothy Day, Audre Lorde, Frances Perkins, Pauli Murray and Alice Austen,  funded by a NY City Council Discretionary Initiative.

Free with RSVP