tangents

Artistic community meant little to me when I first started to take writing seriously. This was around 2008, toward the end of my freshman year of high school. I couldn’t name a single New Yorker staff writer, but the magazine signified everything I thought I wanted, and I sent poems and stories to die in its slush pile every few months. I sent a piece of fiction to The Atlantic, a magazine nearly as glamorous and equally abstract, and months later received a square of paper with a rejection from C. Michael Curtis, signed in what I assumed to be his own blue ballpoint pen.

m. dellas

I had only recently graduated from Nintendo Magazine to Rolling Stone. I had read all of Fitzgerald and most of Vonnegut; if pressed to identify contemporary authors I might, after giving it some thought, have named Salman Rushdie. My friends didn’t write and most didn’t read beyond the books assigned in school. There weren’t poets or novelists on our faculty, and there weren’t any writers in my family. I wasn’t passing artists in the supermarket. Writing was something I did late at night, alone, after homework and clubs, band practices and parties. I wrote in a folding chair at the family computer beside a second-floor window looking out onto the gutter-yellow lights of Hertel Avenue–which, by no coincidence, provided the setting for nearly all of my stories–and I shared this writing with no one except the anonymous interns of venerable New York magazines. I recognized the incredible distance between me and these editorial desks–I was an insatiable consumer of the earliest literary agent blogs–but I had no way to measure it, and no peers to measure up against.

In June 2009 my mom spots a note in the Buffalo News about a new literary arts magazine, Tangent, that is launching out of Buff State and accepting submissions. I send a few poems and by July receive an acceptance. For the first time, I feel the rungs of a ladder beneath my hands. I don’t know how many intervals stretched between me and those offices high above Broadway and Madison and Hudson (streets and numbers I’ve memorized from my countless self-addressed, stamped envelopes), but I think, now that I’m in print, that reaching them will just be a matter of persistence, success inevitable so long as I continue to put one hand over the other.

The launch party that fall is at a new art gallery on Amherst Street in the passed-over neighborhood of Black Rock, not far from the college. I borrow my mom’s red Mazda sedan and drive west, past the supermarket, into the unfamiliar northwest corner of the city. The sun sets in front of me, an orange flame blanketing the lake and burnishing the faces of the people who stand outside the gallery as I drive by. I park outside a row of buildings typical of Buffalo’s commercial streets–hundred-year-old mixed-use doubles, glass storefronts below and apartments above–and walk past the social smokers, in their trilbies and flip-flops and khaki cargo shorts with frayed legs, gesturing with cigarettes clamped to the lips of plastic wine cups. As I reach for the old door’s brass handle, I repeat, silently, football’s old end zone mantra: Act like you’ve been here before.

The art on display ranges widely in sophistication–from mimetic weeaboo cartoons and pop surrealism to bolder mixed-media explorations of queer sexuality–but energy circulates in the room and the atmosphere is collegial, not competitive. People, young people, are talking seriously to each other about art. They aren’t looking at the pieces on display–at least not in the manner of patrons in established collections, who circulate clockwise, hands loosely linked behind their backs, pausing at equal intervals–but each artist’s selected works, tightly packed and spotlit from above, seem to lean off the walls and into the party like distinct personalities.

The Tangent editor, Christina Surdi, spots me, and says a few nice words about the poems I’d shared. I don’t realize it now, but this is my first real-life encounter with a person who’d read my work. She introduces me to the gallery owner and arts editor of the magazine, who says something polite before the currents of the room take him back. I swipe a cup of purply cabernet from a table near the register and focus on dispelling the correct impression that I am alone, sixteen, an interloper.

This was the way I fell into the outer orbit of 464 Gallery and its proprietor, Marcus Wise.

In 2009, shortly after Marcus launched the gallery with Jill Hart, 464 was on its way to becoming one of the brightest cultural loci in Buffalo, anchoring a few blocks of Amherst Street and helping to catalyze a revitalization of the area. While 464’s focus was visual art, it also spun off another group, Emerging Leaders in the Arts Buffalo, or ELAB, which drew in a more eclectic membership spanning poetry, architecture, and art history, focused on improving the city and undertaking large-scale events. Like Broadway-Fillmore’s J.C. Mazur Gallery more than thirty years before, ELAB and 464 were both exercises in art-led community and economic revitalization: 464 helped bring Black Rock into the twenty-first century, while ELAB looked to the south, and in 2012 produced an arts festival called City of Night that reintroduced the region to the wonder of its greatest relics, the hundred-foot grain silos along the Buffalo River, triggering a cascade of attention and investment.

But it was later in 2009 that Marcus launched his own magazine, Spark, a venue for promoting his cohort. Eager for clips, I got back in touch, and he asked me to write profiles. I spent time in the gallery conducting interviews and getting to know the artists who exhibited at 464, rented studio space above, and gathered nightly for film screenings and cookouts in the yard next door. I was never more than peripheral to the inner circle, but Marcus had offered me my first brush with the idea–and practice–of artistic community.

In July 2016, Marcus left for Milwaukee. I saw the news on Facebook. We had fallen out of touch after I left Buffalo to study in Scotland, and I hadn’t gotten around to checking in on 464 since returning in September of the previous year–but I knew what his decision would mean.

Picture a spinning carousel suddenly arrested, all the painted horses flying off in every direction.

Tangent and Spark, both hopeless expenses, had stopped printing long before. City of Night had collapsed under its own success, unable to support the requisite insurance policies for ten thousand visitors to wander semipreserved shipping relics. ELAB limped along and then evaporated. And the core artists I had known at 464 had moved on to other rented rooms. Some had given up, surrendered time and space in their lives to other pursuits, marriages, careers, vacations, leaving less for art. But others, like Chuck Tingley, who had debuted at 464, would go on to stand among the most in-demand creators in the region. And new artists, younger artists, hungry artists moved in to take any open space available. For seven years, 464 had continued to draw and foster new talent, attract attention, and expand the production and enjoyment of art, reaching new lives and new areas of the city.

This kind of artistic community requires, as Don Metz might have put it, a catalyst–one or more individuals whose vision and charisma inspire and sustain an atmosphere of collision, collaboration, confrontation, collage.

Marcus didn’t invent the role he occupied from 2009–2016. He inherited it.

Colin Dabkowski, the great Buffalo News arts critic of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, covered the loss of 464, reminding readers that the Western New York arts elite had responded to the gallery’s debut less than ten years earlier with a mixture of principled disapproval and less principled derision. The work, the cognoscenti had concurred, ranged from technically accomplished and conceptually advanced to sophomoric, commercial, cartoonish. They also took issue with the practice of charging artists for shows to pay the gallery’s rent.

This is a facile, amnesiac critique coming from the boards and executives of the institutions that decades before had locked up the last of this city’s inherited industrial wealth in the form of foundations named for the Bairds, Cullens, Oisheis, and Wendts; who had mastered the politics of steady state funding through SUNY and NYSCA; and pulled down annual six-figure grants from the city’s biggest bank. They forget that originality has always paid its own way. They forget that originality keeps paying, doubling down, kiting checks, and calling favors, until it wins big or goes broke.

This has been the story since the mid-80s, since the great exodus. Probably since before that, too.

Every half-decade or so, a new community converges around one or a handful of artists who have more than talent–who have the charism. And with only a few notable exceptions, these communities collapse, suffocate, scatter. This happens quickly, before the broader cultural ecosystem has even recognized the significance of the emergence–and often just at the moment the buzz reaches the general population of Bills ticketholders.

This isn’t just a Buffalo phenomenon. Artistic communities don’t last anywhere. I’m not talking about museums or magazines or theatre companies, though these, too, often disappear, or worse, become desiccated carapaces of habit. I mean the molecular combinations of the creators themselves, drawn together by common preoccupations and held there in a tension of perspectives, ambitions, or media. By “community” I mean when artists congregate, night after night, often in the same basement, bar, garage, loft apartment, or living room, to sharpen one another in conversation or deaden themselves with old jokes and alcohol.

Whether or not they choose to name themselves, like the Inklings or the Factory, Black Mountain College or the East Buffalo Media Association, these groups fall apart–a key member makes it big, another dies, others fight, and still others get the itch for different scenes in different cities. This is true even in Paris and New York and LA, as we can see in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Chris Kraus’s history of Tiny Creatures, and so many other elegies to those unstable isotopes of the art world, salons and klatches and collectives that flare up for a generation, the better part of a decade, or just a few bright months before burning out.

But this is vividly, tragically true in Buffalo, a city with space and heat and history enough to bring artists together, but without quite enough money or glory to keep most of them from moving on–leaving galleries, reading series, and whole movements to collapse behind them.

These groups, these movements, disappear even before the rising generation can recognize and rebel against them. This means that young artists in Buffalo too often waste time chasing ghosts–or fighting with them. And if you’re an artist chasing ghosts in Buffalo, sooner or later you’ll end up in New York City.

Tangents is an excerpt from I Am Here You Are Not I Love You: Andrew Topolski, Cindy Suffoletto, and Their Life in the Arts, from the University of Iowa Press. Order it from your favorite local bookstore or from the publisher at uipress.uiowa.edu.