Outdoor Murals- Buffalo, New York

From the elegant obelisk rising from the center of Niagara Square in memory of William McKinley to the infinite variety and strangeness of the headstones and mausoleums in Forest Lawn, it’s impossible to travel more than a few of blocks in this place without stumbling onto some hulking reminder of the city’s grand past etched in marble, cast in bronze or chiseled from granite.

To this ever-expanding collection of manifest memories, the Buffalo artist Max Collins has added one more – an unassuming black-and-white photograph of a woman’s piercing eyes wheatpasted to the south side of Ró, a furniture and home store in the Elmwood Village.

But unlike the grand testaments to glories long past that litter the streetscape, Collins’ piece – created in memory of Buffalo artist and Ró co-owner Cortney Morrison-Taylor less than a week after her unexpected death in March – won’t last more than a couple of years.

Like the memory of anyone we lose, Collins’ mural will lose its shape and definition over time, obscured by other thoughts and other worries, until eventually its contours wear away and it becomes part of the air we breathe. It is a memorial designed to mirror the grieving process itself.

Hayley Carrow, Morrison-Taylor’s longtime best friend and business partner at Ró, knows the tribute to Morrison-Taylor will disappear too. But right now, the sight of it is a daily source of comfort. "Right before our furniture launch, he was outside reapplying the glue,” she said of a recent event at Ró where Collins worked to touch up the mural. “That’s his art form. The meaning behind it partly is that it’s not going to last forever. Nothing does.”