By Edmund Cardoni
(Image above: courtesy Burchfield Penney Art Center, RobertJ. Collignon, by David Moog, Archival inkjet print, 20 x 15 inches, Gift of the artist, copyright David Moog, 2015)

In September Buffalo’s art community lost one of its most multitalented, productive, passionate, and beloved fine art and commercial photographers, conceptual artists, and college photo teachers, Robert J. Collignon (1956–2026).

Like many others—from old friends and coworkers of 50 years to fellow artists, to collectors of his work, to current undergraduate students and colleagues at Buffalo State College—members of our community (especially in Hallwalls and CEPA circles) and other communities less known to us (such as military model makers on both sides of the international border of the Niagara Frontier and his fellow collectors and peddlers at The Peddler) have been posting their remembrances of Bob on social media. As an early curatorial colleague who first met Bob 42 years ago when he was the curator of photo exhibitions at CEPA and I was just starting out programming Fiction Diction readings at Hallwalls, I posted my own.

Seeing those posts (both mine and others I shared), editor Elmer Ploetz texted me late one night the week Bob died asking if I would be willing to pull some of these remembrances together for an article in The Buffalo Hive, for those who might not have seen those posts. I took some time first to talk to a few mutual friends who knew Bob better, especially in recent years, and to look through some past published articles available on line, but this is nonetheless my personal (albeit informed) perspective and not in any way a detached, definitive, or official “obituary.”

When I started working part-time at Hallwalls at its 4th-floor 700 Main Street location in fall of 1984, Biff Henrich was the director of CEPA and Bob Collignon was curator. That meant we worked in adjacent office spaces overlooking Main Street, two open-plan offices with a door in between. Our various gallery spaces were adjacent, too, and totally contiguous, with each organization’s exhibitions curated independently by its own curators (including Bob), according to different material and aesthetic criteria, although it might not always have been clear to a gallery visitor where one space left off and the other started.

Opening receptions were held on the same night (starting at 9:00 p.m. in those days!) and filled all the spaces. Between exhibition openings, 16mm and Super-8 film screenings (usually but not always programmed by Hallwalls), as well as artists’ talks and slide presentations by both organizations’ visiting artists and lecturers, took place in different gallery spaces, often Hallwalls’ main gallery, which was the biggest. We shared the wooden folding chairs between us. And other Hallwalls events such as new music concerts, performance art, and the literary readings I organized, as well as parties and fundraisers, all took place in the galleries as well. (Hallwalls didn’t acquire the second-floor Vault space until a couple of years after I got there.)

Although overlapping in terms of personnel and participating artists, closely allied, and fully cooperative going back to mid-1970s 30 Essex Street (wherefrom both organizations had moved together to 700 Main Street in the fall of 1980), Hallwalls and CEPA always had different missions and programs, and it was important to keep those identities distinct in terms of each organization’s autonomy of vision and funding streams.

As a result, there was not as much formal collaboration with each other as one might suppose, or as each organization had separately with other partners, such as CEPA’s long-running partnership with the NFTA on its bus exhibitions and Hallwalls’ numerous co-sponsorships with Media Study/Buffalo. But those formal collaborations that did occur were notable, including CEPA’s 1986 presentation in Hallwalls’ main gallery of Nan Goldin’s original traveling slideshow version (with synced deejay soundtrack) of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, consisting of hundreds of slides shot between 1979 and 1986 which only later became famous in book, 35mm film, and large-format print form on the walls of museums. (I learned about Hallwalls hosting this presentation from Gary Nickard, who had taken over from Biff as CEPA director while Bob Collignon continued as curator; it’s not on Hallwalls’ Timeline.)

Earlier in the eighties (1980–1982, before my time) Hallwalls and CEPA had also collaborated with a third institution—namely the Albright-Knox Art Gallery—on a NEA-funded series of four multi-site exhibitions of work by major artists in all mediums entitled Four by Three. (This series and other Hallwalls/AKG collaborations were commemorated last year with a long-running archival display case assembled by AKG Archivist Gabrielle Carlo from the Museum’s extensive archives of Hallwalls and CEPA ephemera.) Like the major painters and sculptors included in these shows, the roster of photographers curated by Bob Collignon and his CEPA team was stellar and daring, including Ellen Carey, Laurie Simmons, and Robert Mapplethorpe, before the latter became a cause célèbre of the early culture wars.

Here is a brief excerpt from a Facebook comment thread dated April 5, 2018, that now resides on Hallwalls’ Timeline:

Actually, Mapplethorpe’s show in Cincinnati wasn’t just “banned,” as Bob says above, but shut down and the gallery director arrested. Just a few years ago, I was moved to intervene (in no uncertain terms, but unsuccessfully) in support of the artist when the curator (and a friend) of a local visual arts organization I still very much support wanted to exclude a couple of Bob Collignon’s own photographs, which he had donated for their benefit, causing him to withdraw all of them. Curatorially, Bob and I had been forged in a different time when artistic freedom was not, could not be, compromised.

Anyway, jumping back to the mid-eighties, another joint project of CEPA and Hallwalls still memorable to me and thematically important (and still as timely now as it was over 40 years ago) was The Image of War, exhibited in both galleries November 9–December 20, 1985, and curated on CEPA’s part by Bob Collignon and for Hallwalls by Cathy Howe. (For a more detailed description of the artists and works curated by Bob and Cathy than I have room for here, please see the screenshot from Hallwalls’ printed Nov./Dec. 1985 calendar.) Steve Gallagher programmed a night of films on Nov. 18, 1985, and my own contribution was a presentation the next night by Arnoldo Ramos, an exiled professor of literature and Central American poetry scholar traveling the U.S. to speak on behalf of El Salvadoran freedom fighters (including intellectuals) at the height of the Death Squads in his country.

As I recall, the gallery works and films in The Image of War were largely focused on World War II and Nazi propaganda (including seized paintings lent from the collection of the U.S. Army), and it blows my mind to think that the same amount of time has elapsed from that exhibition to now as had elapsed from the end of WWII to the opening of the exhibition, 1945–1985 (not to mention that we are fighting Nazis again today on our own “homeland”).

But more to the point, having seen much more of Bob’s own work as an artist then and since then, starting even before The Image of War (and my job at Hallwalls) with his large color studio prints of toy plastic soldiers (as well as cowboys and Indians) in which his affinity of approach with “Pictures Artist” Laurie Simmons was clear, and continuing through the large, walk-in train models he built for Bob Hirsch’s powerful Holocaust installation at CEPA’s Big Orbit Project Space (Ghosts: French Holocaust Children, June 11–July 23, 2016), up to his own recent installations and assemblages about Hiroshima (which you may have seen at the Burchfield Penney Art Center or in Hallwalls’ 2022 Members Show), I see the connection between his early curatorial sensibility, sustained artistic practice, hobbyist modeling, and serious study of military history.

There are at least two photographs by Bob in the permanent collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, both part of a series dating from the early 1980s period discussed above, when Bob was an artist/curator: “Robert J. Collignon, Photographs from the series Heroes and History, 1983.” Unfortunately, on the web site, instead of photographs of the works, there are blank squares labeled “No image available, but we’re working on it.” (I’ll try to get that rectified.)

Across the street at Buffalo State College, back in the mid-1970s (a couple of years after Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo had been students there), Bob had studied photography with Les Krims and Jim Sylvia, as well as printmaking with then new professor, now Emeritus Professor Peter Sowiski. A few years after graduating, after getting involved with CEPA at 30 Essex Street, in part to access their darkroom, he (like Biff) entered the MFA program at the University at Buffalo, studying with such professors as noted photographers Donald R. Blumberg (b. 1935) and Tyrone Georgiou (b. 1947). According to Gail Nicholson, who would go on to follow in his and Biff’s and Gary Nickard’s footsteps as first a curator then director of CEPA, Bob was her teaching assistant after she moved to Buffalo from Massachusetts to attend UB as an undergraduate, introducing her to photography. Bob left the MFA program before finishing his degree, and then left his nonprofit work at CEPA to build his successful commercial photography partnership Collignon/Jarosz Photography with Dave Jarosz, while never ceasing his fine art photography and mixed media art.

Then about 10 years ago, Bob started teaching photography as an adjunct in the Fine Art Department of Buffalo State, which was soon merged into the Art & Design Department in 2017. He had already started his fall 2026 semester classes when he had to take what he had hoped would be a brief sick leave, and his students were devastated by the shocking news that his return to their classroom studio was never to be.

Painter Candace Masters, currently Chair of the Art & Design Department., told me this about Bob as a teacher: “He was [already] teaching in the photography program in the former Fine Art Department before the four former departments were merged in 2017, and quite a long time before I became chair of the new combined department. At first he was one of a couple of photography adjuncts, but he put all his efforts into that program, and so was essentially running it for the past three years after the only full-time person left. He volunteered so much time, far beyond what an adjunct is expected to do or is paid for, spent many days in the summer not getting paid at all, volunteering and running workshops without the full-time title. I really only got to know him in the past five years, since prior to that I was in a different department. He really was such a kind, good-humored person. I witnessed how wonderful he was with students; they adored him.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by his fellow modelers: “It is with a very heavy heart that I announce the passing of Bob Collignon of IPMS [International Plastic Modelers’ Society] Niagara Frontier. Bob passed away last Tuesday [9/22/26]. He was only in his late sixties. Bob was a long-time member of IPMS Niagara Frontier [and] part of the BUFFCon Shows as a participant and vendor. I personally met Bob way back in 1983 at my very first BUFFCon show. He built ‘armour’ and was considered a master modeler in this community. He was also a professional commercial photographer based in Buffalo, and owned an award-winning professional photography studio. He will be missed on both sides of the border.” Dana John Nield, a Society member and fellow modeler Bob had mentored as a teenager, posted: “I’m absolutely gutted by the news out of Buffalo. Bob was a master modeler and a master photographer. Always ready to help at shows and coached a 17-year-old me to be a better modeler at a Torcan Scale Model Show long ago. Rest easy, my friend.” In a review of one of his photography exhibitions, Artvoice noted that “He’s also a master modeler, having worked professionally with General Motors, Old Fort Niagara, and others” (June 10, 2016).

Finally, again referencing various friends’ social media posts, specifically below Jozef Bajus’s of September 28, Bob had participated with other notable Buffalo fine artists in a series of pulp papermaking workshops led by his professor of 40 years earlier, Pete Sowiski, at his studio on Lafayette Avenue, culminating in a memorable group exhibition at WNY Book Arts Center entitled Pulp/fictions.

“Pulp/fictions, 2017—a group exhibition of WNY artists Bob Collignon, Linda Collignon, Debra Eck, Ani Hoover, Billy Huggins, Bonnie Morrisey, Kate Stapleton-Parzych, Mizin Shin, Peter Sowiski, Janna Willoughby, & Jozef Bajus. These images from the paper making sessions of our KOZO group at Peter Sowiski studio in 2017 and the opening reception/fun mustache party at WNYBAC are even more special now after unexpected passing of our dear friend Bob Collingon” (Jozef Bajus, Facebook post, 9/28/26).

A gathering of family, friends, students, and colleagues to remember and celebrate Bob Collignon’s life and work has been planned to take place at WNY Book Arts Center, 468 Washington St., Buffalo, next Friday, (October 23, 2026), 4-8 p.m. Having known Bob as an artist, curatorial colleague, collector, gourmand, garlic farmer, family man, Bills fan, and friend, I will certainly be there, and I hope you will be, too.

Edmund Cardoni retired as executive director of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in 2025 after over 30 years in that job and 40 years with the organization.