R.D. Pohl: First of all, congratulations on the book, Aidan!

I think it’s a significant piece of work that will be read and remarked upon for some time, and not only because of your relationship to the two principal figures you profile in the book, your aunt Cindy Suffoletto and your uncle Andrew Topolski. I’ve been fortunate to know you well enough to know the book’s backstory, but for the readers of The Buffalo Hive, can you tell us about how this book came to be and why you chose to make your first full-length book of prose about your aunt and uncle?

Aidan Ryan: Threads of this book reach way back—into my childhood, I mean—and only began to come together in February of 2020, when a former Soho gallerist named Eric Siegeltuch mailed a packet of photographs to my uncle Tom. Eric had been trying to mail the photographs to Cindy and he was shocked to learn that she had died eight years earlier. I’m grateful beyond words that he persisted in finding my uncle Tom, because without those photographs, this project may never have begun.

The photographs showed Andy and Cindy (and Eric) in Paris in the 90s, very much looking the part of up-and-coming American artists abroad. It was a jolt of a reminder that my uncle and aunt were artists, working artists, and while I had always known this, I had little understanding of what that part of their lives involved or how it felt to them.

After Eric, the second person I have to thank is Mark Dellas, the photographer and publisher of Traffic East. He was asking for new writing in July of 2020 just as my curiosity about those photographs reached a boiling point. I thought I would write a short essay about Andy and Cindy, whom I knew had met somewhere around Hallwalls in the very early 80s. I thought their relationship could be an interesting window into what I knew to be a pivotal moment in Buffalo’s cultural history. (But really, I discovered, I didn’t know the half of it.)

At that point, the thread that began with the photographs and the thread that ran through Hallwalls entangled with two other threads that began much earlier in my development as a writer.

In May of 2012, when Cindy died (I was eighteen) my family asked me to give a eulogy. I address this in detail in the book, but in short, I felt that I had left something unfinished there, in that strange act of public, ritualized writing. As I began the essay about Andy and Cindy, I realized I might try to finish that eight-year-old project of eulogizing my aunt and godmother.

But I’d also point to 2008, the year Andy died, which coincidentally was the year that I began writing feature profiles of artists for 464 Gallery, which Marcus Wise then operated at 464 Amherst Street in Black Rock. When I started to discover just how brilliant, distinct, and influential my uncle Andy was—and then how he was largely written out of the histories of Hallwalls, postminimalism, Intermedia, and the Pictures Generation—I realized I could do something for Andy, too. In the years since his passing, I’d developed a fluency with the magazine profile as a form, from those early 464 days to my years as a stringer for The Skinny, an outlet for music writing based in Scotland. I enjoyed articulating things about and for artists whose mode and means of expression might not have been language.

Annie Ernaux said she writes to avenge her people. In that sense, Andy and Cindy are my people. I wrote this to avenge them, to correct the record, to speak for two people—two extraordinary and original artists—who aren’t here to speak for themselves today, and who weren’t terribly good at speaking for themselves when they were alive.


Pohl: As a reader, I could think of many ways to describe this book. It’s partly the personal memoir of a young writer who aspires to a life in the arts. It also contains meticulously researched biographies of your aunt and uncle Cindy Suffoletto and Andrew Topolski as people and as artists. There’s about a 75-page syncretic history of the emergence of an avant-garde arts scene in Buffalo’s 20th century that is unmatched by anything I’ve ever read before. And there are also elements of what can only be described as autotheory in dramatizing the anecdotal information you unearthed in your research. At one point you write: “To get to the center of events in the past, you need to find the perimeter. Cover as many points as you can and march inward from each of them. The trick is to start at all the somewhere elses—to start everywhere at once.” Can you explain how you arrived at this method, and why you settled on it as the one you necessarily had to pursue in this book?

Ryan: That’s an incredibly generous description, Bob. But I appreciate that you ask about this method. It was intentional, but I think it reflects a much older habit of mind. In a way, the book took the shape of my thinking.

You once made a similar observation about some of my short nonfiction—I think you said that I “move around” topics or “wander.” And you’re not the first to point that out: a college professor also used that word, “syncretic,” to describe my papers. I used to listen to a lot of modal jazz when writing, and I think there’s a connection. That music felt like thought.

But I’ve learned that not every piece of writing can sustain that kind of movement. If the writer isn’t making the connections clear, but just saying “look at this thing I noticed, look at this other thing I noticed,” it can get boring, even annoying. (Sometimes you want a thought to move like the blues.)

Three factors collided with this familiar habit as the book progressed. First, I ran into various roadblocks, either due to the pandemic, missing documentation, or hard-to-reach sources. That meant I literally had to “start somewhere else,” again and again, leaving half-begun attempts behind me. Then, when I realized I was writing a book rather than an essay, the possibilities of this modal form opened up. I had adequate space to develop things like the Buffalo arts history and the novelistic or more critical passages and depart from the expectations of a linear, conventional biography. Finally, I realized this habit and the emerging structure of the book bore some resemblance to Andy’s Intermedia art practice. In one series, for example, Andy took found text, “erased” it with a mathematical formula, transfered shapes based on the absences onto vellum, and then devised a way for the work hanging on the wall to double as a score to be interpreted by a musical ensemble in the gallery. His art incorporated literature, science, anthropology, and later mass media. He gave me license to run a little wild—to write a biography that incorporated memoir, theory, local history, light fiction, even a close reading of a U.S. Department of Energy Report.

I don’t think of this book in isolation; it’s always been part of a broader project to resuscitate and reposition Andy and Cindy’s artwork. That project has included the book, the short documentary film, archival recordkeeping, recovering and preserving lost art, and now discussions of potential gallery shows. Perhaps Andy’s preferred term, Intermedia, is a fit for the whole thing.


Pohl: There’s a sensitive matter that you handle with great deftness from the very outset of the book to its final pages. That matter is how the relationship between Andrew and Cindy as both artists and life partners evolved from the time they left Buffalo to their first studios and apartments in Brooklyn , and then finally to Seminary Road in Callicoon, NY. An overly simplistic reading of the book might draw the conclusion that Cindy made a series of incremental decisions over the decades that subordinated her own work to the work of Andrew, and functioned as his manager, caregiver, and confidant over the years, performing gendered emotional, social, and material labor . That’s not how you present their story though, although you certainly show that you’re aware of that possible interpretation. Early on in the book you write something that describes their creative partnership succinctly: “They learned to be alone together first inside ideas.”

As someone who has spent three years and over three hundred pages detailing the evolution of that relationship, and as someone who is married to a brilliant writer yourself, how did you negotiate the possible gender politics of writing about such a complicated dynamic between two people you dearly loved?

Ryan: In “Canto 120” (published in Buffalo, as I’m sure you know, in the magazine Anoynm, co-edited by Mark Robison and John Wieners), Ezra Pound writes what may as well have been his last words: “Let the Gods forgive what I have made / Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.” If I got this wrong, Bob—let Cindy and Andy try to forgive me.

Yes, the inherited expectations of gender played a role here. In the book, I observe that the women in my matrilineal line (Suffoletto-Donaruma-Manella) tended to be strong, capable, and sociable—but unassuming. They raised children and they worked; they knew how to use pizzelle irons as well as miter saws; they were comfortable at the center of attention but didn’t seek it out. (And, in fact, they tended to marry men with even bigger personalities: who not only were comfortable at the center of attention, but often sought it.) This environment shaped Cindy, as it shaped my own mother, her younger sister by a year. Cindy broke out of this mold a little bit, and not only by her unconventional choices to drop out of college, live in a former ice warehouse, and move to New York. On a deeper level, to be an artist means to ask for attention, even to demand it. I think Cindy was always somewhat ambivalent about that part of being an artist, and later, when Andy’s career began to take off, requiring more time and effort to sustain it, the supporting role that awaited Cindy must have felt, in some ways, familiar, if not predetermined.

But I think “supporting role” risks misrepresenting their relationship. Cindy was a force. Socially, I would even say that she overpowered Andy. And she was an artist of exceptional technical ability and uncommon vision. She made choices—not just to support Andy, but to become enmeshed in the creation of his art. I wanted to respect those choices while remaining clear-eyed about the external factors that likely influenced them. I was careful to draw the comparison to Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, a generation before: just as the Pollock we know wouldn’t have been possible without Krasner, the Topolski we know wouldn’t have been possible without Suffoletto. Lee had thirty years after her husband’s death to rediscover and reposition herself as an artist, and it was a drawn-out, difficult process. Cindy only had four. What she was able to accomplish in that time is extraordinary—a body of sophisticated, innovative, and disquieting work, ready and worthy of a solo show in any New York gallery at the time of her death in 2012. But because of the demands of her cancer, her distance from support networks and advocates in the art world, and perhaps her own eroded sense of possibility after fifteen years away from the studio, that solo show never happened.

As you note, another writer might not have arrived at this treatment. The “wife of” gravitational pull would have been too strong to resist. Yes, I knew them both as family before I knew them as artists, but I don’t think I would have been able to write that line—that Andy and Cindy “learned to be alone together first inside ideas”—if not for Rachelle. Our relationships are different in important ways, but that one line could just as easily describe us.

Artists have to be a little selfish. They steal time from employers, beg favors from friends, let someone else pick up the tab. They often need to prioritize their art above all other conventional expectations. That comes with trade-offs and consequences impacting the artist but also impacting those closest to them. When two artists are also romantic or domestic partners, trade-offs can become imbalances and imbalances can become injustices. But when it works, it can be incredibly powerful, sustaining both the work and the people. This is true in a practical sense—who’s on deadline, who’s making dinner. But it’s also true of the art-making, the process of creation, not just the many ancillary processes that make the space for creation possible. Artists who live together talk with each other about their work constantly. They share their earliest drafts and sketches, help each other make the inchoate incarnate. With a partner, art can be a lot more fun and a little less lonely.

I know what it’s like to learn to be alone with someone inside ideas. And I’m grateful I discovered that—with Rachelle—before attempting this book.

Pohl: A great deal of this book has to do with Andrew Topolski’s posthumous reputation as a post-minimalist and post-conceptualist artist, and specifically whether his work should be included in the canon of the so-called “Pictures Generation” of artists that emerged from Hallwalls Contemporary Center in Buffalo and other places (California Institute of the Arts and Artists Space in New York City) in the 1970s and 1980s. Your argument that he should be included convinced me. But I’m not the decider. (I also think the term “Pictures Generation” might be a bit narrow and misleading to describe that generational cohort, and perhaps even a misnomer.)

Charlotta Kotik once very aptly applied the term “Magic Geometry” to describe Andrew’s work. And Anthony Bannon described his practice as “a cross between John Cage, László Moholy-Nagy, and Joseph Beuys.” Other critics described his drawing as “like a 21st Century Neo-Platonist,” or even “like the music of the spheres” [that’s Johannes Kepler by way of Pythagoras].

My own view is to look at Andrew’s work through the frame of 20th century semiotic theory (Saussure, Charles Sanders Pierce, and Félix Guattari) as exploring the liminal space between the signifier and the signified—”the arbitrariness of the signifier” as we used to say in post-structuralist critical theory in the 1980s—but no critic has ever written about Andrew’s work in that way.

One of the great achievements of this book is your effort to begin to find the elements of a critical language to talk about Andrew’s work. How much did you have to immerse yourself in all the critical discourse surrounding his work and the work of his generational peers in order to parse out your arguments?

Ryan: My critical appraisal of both Andy’s and Cindy’s work was one of the last pieces to emerge and find a place in this manuscript. I knew I had to take this on, but I was also acutely aware of my limitations as a writer and thinker. I’m not a visual arts critic, historian, or curator. I feel that I’m not the right person to begin this critical reappraisal in earnest—perhaps the best I can do is to rearrange the furniture, what little critical and curatorial language already exists around Andy and Cindy and their peers, and see what new uses might suggest themselves to more capable minds.

I knew Andy’s and Cindy’s work was special. I knew that it was good, really good, and even as a child I sensed it deserved greater attention. But this project allowed me the opportunity to put their work in context—and realize just how much more attention they really did deserve.

First I immersed myself in any critical responses to Andy’s and Cindy’s work. In Cindy’s case, this amounted to a nod from Anthony Bannon in a review of a Buff State student show, a later Buffalo News review of a joint show with her friend Brian Duffy, and a mention in a Brooklyn Phoenix review of a group show at the Brooklyn War Memorial—plus what I could glean from the catalogs advertising various group shows, in particular 1984’s Personal Effects at Hallwalls (curated by Robin Dodds) and 1990’s Autour de Kolář Collage at Galerie Schüppenhauer in Köln, Germany. Despite the scant critical record and the significant gap in her studio production, I felt all available evidence suggested that Cindy’s art historical contexts include both the Pictures Generation (as an admittedly late entrant) and Fluxus. Her late-life series of nearly fifty self-portraits using manipulated Xerography and found organic material demands to be in conversation with the other Cindy from Buffalo: Cindy Sherman. I’m not up to that task but hope the book will inspire others better equipped.

In Andy’s case I had a much richer archival record, encompassing many excellent curatorial essays and critical responses stretching from The Buffalo News to Artforum, even a lecture that the collector Wynn Kramarsky delivered in German, which I had to enlist a friend to translate. I also looked more broadly at scholarly works on the period Andy and Cindy moved through—a period that, I’d say, Andy inarguably shaped. These included Vera Dika’s The Pictures Generation at Hallwalls and the gallery book for the AKG’s Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970s. While I focused much of my research on Buffalo’s cultural history, I also had to look further back and beyond Buffalo—Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press: The Selected Writing of Dick Higgins (a Christmas gift from Rachelle) was helpful in refining my approach. Even more than scholarly books, though, I relied on people—Tony Bannon, Charlotta Kotik, Peter Kotik, Charlie Clough, and others who lived through these revolutions in art and culture and could tell me not only what they meant, but what they felt like.

I think you’re onto something new and very interesting by connecting Andy’s work to semiotic theory. I’m looking right now at a gallery booklet from an exhibition called First Thoughts: Working Drawings by Seven Artists, which was up in March and April 1993 at the Gallery at Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton, New Jersey and featured Alice Aycock, Bryan Hunt, Melissa Meyer, Hugh O’Donnell, Dorthea Rockburne, Andrew Topolski, and Jack Tworkov. The guest curator was Jill Snyder, who would go on to hold executive and curatorial posts at the Freedman Gallery at Albright College, the Aldrich Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. In her introduction to the exhibition, she remarks that Andy’s “hybrid drawings … are at the intersection of art, photography, and language.” I think contemporary admirers recognized that Andy’s work drew on different knowledge systems and the symbols and alphabets that express them, and that it blurred the lines between drawing, plan, sculpture, music, and performance, among other modes. But photography and language—those elements drew less attention. I think you are in good company with Jill to argue that they are, in fact, essential.

She goes on to say that “The heterogenous layers of text, mathematical notations, geometry, musical notes, photographs, maps, and topographical measurements in Andrew Topolski’s work refer to real, remembered, and imagined places and events … his systems move beyond representation, hence their attendant mystery.” I think pairing Jill’s observations as a curator and your intuitions as a semiotic theorist suggest an exciting place to begin a critical reappraisal of Andy’s work and context.

And yes, the “Pictures” part of the Pictures Generation seems accidental and definitely misleading. I look at that group of artists on a literalist-conceptualist spectrum. On the literalist end, I see the artists as interested primarily in bringing Pop Art up to speed with CNN. On the conceptualist side—where Andy and Cindy worked—I see the artists as interested in enacting multiple transformations and translations: product into image, image into sculpture, sculpture into orchestra, artist into subject, subject into Xerox, and so on.

Pohl: There are a few absolutely jaw-dropping discoveries you make in researching this book. One of them is that nearly forty of Andrew’s pieces—I gather that some of these represented his most elaborately constructed and installed work—went missing from Berlin’s long defunct Galerie von der Tann in the late 1990s and have never been recovered. Another is that from the mid to late 1990s, he occasionally grossed “six figures” annually in sales and commissions but that the expenses involved in producing and executing these pieces at the scale he wanted to be operating essentially left him and Cindy living commission to commission. After his early years in New York, Andrew lacked a “quarterback” (a term coined by his friend Eric Siegeltuch, and a metaphor I think Buffalo-based readers in particular can readily understand) to serve as his combination of gallerist, dealer, agent, and matchmaker to connect him to the class of moneyed collectors in the art world at least in part because his work was so formally rigorous and esoteric.

How much of an education in the vicissitudes of the art market and the constant churn of what collectors and gallerists want did writing this book provide you with and what insights about art and commerce did it leave you with?

Ryan: I knew very little about the mechanics of the art economy before undertaking this project, but I was grateful for the patient guidance of sources who have occupied its every corner—including working artists (like Charlie Clough, John Toth, Raymond Saá, Ann Ledy, and Bob Gulley), collectors (Pieter and Marina Meijer, Gerald Mead, Laura Kramarsky), major museum curators (Charlotta Kotik, Jill Snyder, Judith Brodie, Douglas Eklund), archivists and registrars (Heather Gring, Mary Helen Miskuly, Nancy Weekly), critics (Tony Bannon), commercial gallerists (Eric Siegeltuch, Eric Stark, Elga Wimmer, Jessica Berwind, Stefan von Bartha), nonprofit leaders (Ed Cardoni), art insurance executives (Christiane Fischer-Harling), and unclassifiable Virgils (Peter Muscato, Michael Randazzo, Big Mike). I also read a lot of arts coverage from the 70s through the early 2000s, biographies like Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women and Maggie Nelson’s Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, and the occasional outside take, like Tom Wolfe’s excellent book-length Atlantic essay “The Painted Word.” I came away from this with an appreciation for a two things:

(1) Andy and Cindy lived through an extraordinary shift in the economics of art, as collecting at scale moved from a pastime of aristocrats and cognoscenti to an investment strategy for banks, hedge fund managers, and organized crime.
(2) Stable financial success and canonization as an artist is either a freak accident or the result of years of coordinated and sustained effort on the part of many—many—savvy and well-placed advocates, for reasons that often have little to do with the art.


Pohl: The consistent emotional valence and through-line of this book is your grief at the loss of Andrew (who died in 2008 at age 56) and Cindy (who died in 2012, not yet age 50) not only as role models for what a possible life in the arts might look like, but as relatives who took a keen personal interest in you and your sister, Talia. Several times you detail how much your fully grown self—an author and publisher now, and “co-quarterback” (with Rachelle) of your own literary communities—misses the opportunity to converse with them as peers and friends.

Given the fact that no eulogy, no biography, no memoir—no matter how eloquent—can ever resurrect the dead, will you consider my reading of this book—your first book!—as perhaps as close as any young writer can come to communing with the two artists and people who helped steer him into a life in the arts, and through their vivid presence as subjects of this book, helped guide him to find his own voice?

Ryan: Thank you for that reading, Bob. I’m so happy that you feel the book succeeded in that way.

I do think that writing can be a means of continuing a dialogue with the dead.

Rachelle’s close work and friendship with the poet Peter Gizzi happened to blossom while I was in the depths of this book, and you may be picking up some ambient influence of that lineage here.

I’d point to these lines from his poem “Tradition & the Indivisible Talent,” which playfully wrestles with T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

When a thought’s thingness
begins to move, to become
unmoored and you ride
the current with your head,
feel yourself lift off like
birdsong caught in the inner ear
even the curious seem animated
in their dusty shelves—
the song is alive.
That part of tradition.

The curious on Peter’s dusty shelves may be Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, anyone. The song—the poem, the writing—is the living place where the writer and the reanimated dead can meet. Talent, or the movement that makes the poem, is an indivisible polyphony.

In an interview with Ben Lerner, Peter said that “I work from an understanding of my voice as a made thing; it’s built from both my autobiography and my bibliography.” As both relatives and artists, Andy and Cindy are part of my autobiography and my bibliography. They are part of my voice. (Or as Peter would say, the voice I’m “just visiting” right now.)

Because of this, it’s a difficult project to leave behind, much more difficult than, say, a novel. I may never again have access to Andy and Cindy in the way I did while I was writing this book. But they both viewed art as a continuous process. Now I do, too. The dialogue will continue into the next work and the next—changed, but still bearing Andy and Cindy and me onward through a living tradition—all part of an aleatory unfolding composition for numberless voices.