Death and the Artist

Max Collins, untitled (Portland Bridges), 2016. 35 mm photograph.

Courtesy of the artist.

Max Collins was out with his camera looking at bridges. 

In Buffalo, Collins could seemingly make a half dozen projects materialize out of thin air by picking up the phone, but now he was in Portland, Oregon. It was as far away as one could get in the continental United States from the city where he had just finished his MFA. He left in pursuit of a new relationship with a woman who had moved there a year prior. Now he was living with her and two roommates and taking up the odd job — café barista, art preparator at the Portland Art Museum, collaborator on a printmaking venture — and late at night or early before dawn, wandering with camera in hand to look at bridges 

Photograph of memorial walk installation created at Max Collins Dougy Center Memorial Art Workshops, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Max Collins.

Bisected by the Willamette River, Portland is a good place for such activity. There is something potent in bridges: industrial wonders, monumental, full of hubris. “I get overwhelmed by the scale of industry,” Collins says. Going out to gaze at bridges day after day, you might get a sense for the scope of human achievement, but other people might begin to wonder what you’re doing with your life.

“The thing you have to understand about Max,” says Kayla Czysz, the woman Collins had followed to Portland and who is now his wife, “is that he’s constantly questioning everything.” 

Czsyz and Collins joke that he is a leaf on the wind. The first thing you notice meeting Collins is how warm he is. As you fall in love with him, you realize that he’s genuine and present and looks you in the eye with real affection. And with all of that, he has a relentless need to be of service, a need that carries him forward in perpetual motion. In Portland, unmoored and searching, would that need just carry Collins back to Buffalo? 

Around this time, a friend from home passed and Collins found himself, thousands of miles away, helping his friend’s mom create memorial objects. Here he was, using all his art production and photography skills to create memorial posters. It felt useful. From there, he decided to start calling funeral homes to see if he could put his art into service. 

It was not the first time he had dealt with grief. Between 2013 and 2014 Collins worked with Painkillers Kill, an awareness campaign that focused on the pain of family members who had lost loved ones to opioid use. In a society where addiction is seen as weakness, it was almost shameful to speak of these dead, and those grieving often carried their loss behind a veil of secrecy. Collins worked as a photography director and, for his first project, enlarged an image of one of the deceased that he then wheat pasted to a garage door. Collins remembers nervously unrolling the giant photograph of this family’s son, but the image seemed to bring them relief. Maybe there was something to it. As he did a series of shoots for the campaign featuring this wheat pasting technique, Collins found that families would leave all smiles. 

Close up of completed memorial artwork from Max Collins Dougy Center Memorial Art Workshops, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Max Collins.

But Collins’s grief was personal too. In 2015, Cortney Morrison-Taylor passed away. A designer and the co-owner of Ró Home Shop in Buffalo, she had been a partner to Collins on and off beginning in 2012 when they collaborated on an exhibition called Seeing Black and White. Collins was close to her family. Some of the people from Painkillers Kill attended her memorial. As he had for so many others, he created a wheat paste mural for Morrison-Taylor: just her eyes peeking out along the base of her building. “For the first time, I was on the other side of it in a way,” Collins recalls. 

At the time, he was grinding through his MFA. As part of the program, he had begun wrapping natural objects — boulders, fallen logs, trees — in paper. Over time, he began to wrap branches and reclaimed lumber as well. He was particularly excited by wood with a special connection to place, wood that had a history and a life before him. For paper he’d use scraps of newspaper, receipts, anything at hand, employing wheat paste to make this archive of daily life into a kind of protective veil. It would be unfair to say he began consciously to memorialize Morrison-Taylor, but who could prevent grief entering? Collins would drive out to places like Niagara Falls and throw the objects into the water, letting ninety thousand cubic feet of water per second wash away whatever those bundles of wood and paper held. Years later he understood that these were not veils but shrouds. 

Collins seems to work in an almost unselfconscious way. “We did this, and then we did this, and then we did this,” always moving forward without the need to go back, to make corrections, or to theorize, and so the work is not just about the end product; it’s a buildup of doing that floods intention with action, emotional release carried out in the undertow of process.

 In another project in 2015, Collins worked with artist and surrogate older brother David Mitchell to take over the fifth floor of Hi-Temp Fabrication, then located downtown. Over the preceding years, Collins had made the news for his wheat paste murals around the city: PUSH Buffalo one day, Jim’s Steakout the next. There was a time when three out of every four covers of Artvoice was a Collins mural. It was getting so that he couldn’t put one up without people knowing it was him. Mitchell, who is known for ambitious conceptual installation projects, wasn’t as impressed. Collins’s work was straightforward: what you see is what you get. Collins didn’t disagree, and the two became friends, with Mitchell prodding him on. 

Max Collins, rien ne se crée (from the exhibition ‘Last Exit’), 2015. Tree branches wrapped in paper. Appx. 12 ft x 8 ft x 8 ft. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Max Collins.

Collins brought twenty thousand pounds of branches into the Hi-Temp building. He was working all from the gut. His mother would say, “Chop wood, carry water.” He wrapped the wood in paper, loosely stacking the limbs into a kind of woven circle almost ceiling high. It was something animal and substantial, part nest, part funeral mound. Collins lit it from within so that beams of light filtered through its tangled branches into a fog-filled room. Viewers traveling up to the space by elevator would first feel a low bass drone that rose like a subtle unease within them. John McKendry, owner of the space, asked Collins who he was building it for. Right, maybe it all comes back to that. 

Morrison-Taylor’s family had kept Collins close after her death, allowing him to mourn with them through family gatherings. It was around this time that he connected with Kayla Czsyz, the best friend of Morrison-Taylor’s sister. The two grew close by sharing memories, trying together to make sense of what happened. At some point their time with each other began to feel romantic. When Czsyz left for Portland, Collins eventually packed up and joined her. 

Cold-calling funeral homes was not an incredibly successful strategy, so, in part to pay the bills, Collins started working as a funeral attendant. Funeral attendants are contract workers, called up from a labor pool by different funeral homes when assistance is needed. Collins could be on call any time, doing things like picking up the hearse, loading in the deceased, picking up flowers, and in general, being of service to the funeral director. He studied the work. 

“People realize pretty quickly that being a funeral director is not going to fulfill their goth dreams,” says Kelly Power, one of Collins’s colleagues at the time. A funeral director is a lot of different things at once: an event organizer, a therapist, and a financial planner, and a successful one is able to put themselves aside and serve the families of those lost. 

“You have to hold space for the people you are caring for,” says Power. “They are looking to you to be a guide.” 

Details mattered: arranging the chairs in an intimate circle, getting the exact right kind of flower, wearing the deceased’s favorite color, hanging a special blanket just so. There was a lot in common with the work of the art preparator. More than that, though, Collins noticed what photography did here. What images do people use to mark their dead? Maybe it’s some throwaway snapshot of an uncle in the kitchen, laughing and cooking; maybe it’s a mother with a kid snuggled in her lap, a book in front of her. Photography meant something here that it couldn’t in a gallery. 

Max Collins, Memorial Mural of Roberto Clemente, 2015. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Max Collins.

As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Collins honed his high-school interest in the camera until it became something adept, almost automatic. The camera was a pass into any social world, an excuse to ask any stranger a question. Give a shy kid a camera and suddenly he has a mission. Collins had worked like a demon, sometimes eighty hours a week as a photo editor at the prestigious student-run Michigan Daily, while exorcizing his creative energies in a BFA program. From then on, the camera was and remains his vehicle for connecting with the world. 

Now, here was an opportunity to bring all the threads together: photography, community, service, and the value of life while we have it. 

Collins immersed himself in the profession, apprenticing as a funeral director and eventually taking on the role himself. During that time, he became involved with Dougy Center, an organization founded to give kids a chance to talk about and understand death with other kids. Since its founding, it has grown to include other peer-to-peer support groups and fostered the creation of similar programs all over the world. One of the events they organized in Portland was a memorial 5K for grievers; at the beginning of the event, participants would read the names of the dead. Collins got in touch with the organizers to see if participants would also like to create portraits. 

In a typical workshop, Collins would provide each participant with a big piece of wood and a small block and make copies of black-and-white photos they had given him. Kids would color in the photos with colored pencils. The small-scale version would be, in part, a memento to take away and, in part, practice for the larger board. There’s something special about working on a photo of someone that’s two by three feet. Collins remembers one of the very first girls to do the workshop. She had come with her father and was coloring a photo of her mother who had passed, going over her mother’s lips in pink before moving on to the lines of her face and then the shadows. “I feel like I’m drawing my mom back to life,” she said. 

Participants hand-mount the portraits to wood using wheat paste, a gesture more than merely practical. Touch is one of those things denied you by the dead, and it is one of those senses deadened by loss. When you don’t have a spiritual practice that says you’re going to see and be with the dead again or that tells you that their souls live on, the rituals of touch and making come to mean communion. Here, people touch the portraits like they are touching people again, manipulating the images to drape over wood, smoothing out folds or pushing them into creases. 

There’s a kind of stubborn lesson in the material. You might think of the end product that you want; you might think of the process as something you get to control. As the portraits get wet and moved, though, sometimes they tear or fray. In the end, you need to let go. 

Power says that Collins was not afraid to be vulnerable with people. The profession, according to her, “really kind of scars you, but it also creates this portal of navigating through the world, where it’s not that big of a deal.” 

“Death can be a reality shattering experience,” Collins says. “Your brain takes a while to compute, ‘I'm never going to see this person again.’ That creates this heightened awareness of life itself. I have a lot more of those experiences where, like, I’m with my dad — and we’re not a very affectionate family — but I’ll really touch my dad and put my hand on his shoulder. I’m not going to be able to do that forever.” 

“I started taking in the life around me in a new, heightened way,” Collins says, “When I first started dating Kayla, we’d go for walks and talk, and she’d stop and smell every flower. The way she absorbs life — I admire it.” 

The artist photographed by Pat Cray. Courtesy of the artist.

of the pandemic. Czsyz became a therapist with a local group practice, and Collins opened a brick-and-mortar shop on Main Street. He called it Hallow Studios: a name he had used for the workshops he ran back in Portland. It was an attempt to make the work his full-time job. It immediately opened a host of questions: "How do I market a business helping people in grief?" "How do I make this work accessible to people?" "Are people going to think I'm profiting off of grief?" 

“I was at this point where I wanted to make this experience for people, but I also needed to pay my rent,” says Collins. 

Around this time, Springville Center for the Arts (SCA) awarded Collins an artist residency through Creatives Rebuild New York. Springville, New York, is the kind of town where Main Street still has a butcher and a hardware store, but in the last decade or so its more offbeat, artistic strain has begun to make itself felt. In part, this has been motivated by the galvanizing force of Seth Wochensky, SCA’s director since 2010. Wochensky has helped quadruple SCA’s budget, spearheaded the incredible rebuild of Art’s Cafe, and is currently in the middle of a similar transformational renovation of SCA’s headquarters, a former Baptist church. 

Realizing he had something to learn from SCA, Collins set his business and personal practice to the side and dove into community work. Collins and fellow resident artist Alisia Glasier operate out of the The Lab, an SCA satellite workshop, developing and boosting the organization’s art offerings. He’s become a full-time facilitator, often spending his days in meetings. But instead of allowing this to become an impediment to the artmaking, it’s become one of things he loves most about the job. Rather than guard his autonomy, Collins has let it all flow into the work with the community. 

“There’s this art school attitude that if you’re not making work that is conceptual or process-based, then what value is it? Over time, I've realized that it's more exciting for me to let go of control and see what takes shape,” says Collins. 

Max Collins, Faces Of Springville (Seth), 2023. Digital Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

One example of this might be his “Faces of Springville” series. Collins is trying to take portraits of as many people as he can in the town, almost like an old-fashioned portrait studio. He’s shooting in natural light in black-and-white on his phone. He holds the phone low and gets the subject talking so they forget the phone is there. In the spring when his residency ends, there will be an installation of the portraits. He also plans to seal copies of all the photographs in a time capsule to be buried in a ceremony at SCA and not opened for twenty-five years. It’s Springville as it is right now, history in the making. But it’s more than that, too. 

Czsyz says that one of the things that connects all of Collins’s work is healing. “And what is healing if it doesn’t include the collective, if it doesn’t include social expression, if it doesn’t include community-building and a liberatory politic of joy?” As Collins’s practice has become increasingly social, it seems to ask: What if the people are the art? What if the art is the project we undertake together? 

Residents of Springville describe meeting Collins and immediately becoming friends. He’s constantly bringing people into the mix and making art approachable, they recount. One mentioned that she’s trying to get him to move there permanently. His portraits catch people striking poses, telling stories, putting on prop hats. There are a lot of smiles, too. 

by M. Delmonico Connolly

M. Delmonico Connolly writes, often about race and music, and revises sentences, often about art, at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. His chapbook Ronnie Spector in Rock Gomorrah is out from Gold Line Press (2020).