Growing up in the Ulster County hamlet of Marlboro, Ivan Cash thought it was normal for everyone to have at least one parent who was an artist. Only later did the award-winning artist and filmmaker realize that being the son of sculptor Sydney Cash and teacher/musician Julie Cash provided him with a distinctive perspective and a mix of experiences that would shape his own creativity. He explores this artistic legacy in his documentary Sydney Cash Makes Too Much Art, which will get its world premiere screening at the 2026 Woodstock Film Festival on October 16 at 5pm at the Woodstock Playhouse. A Q&A with the Cash family will follow.
Ivan likes to sum up his childhood with an anecdote. When he was in fifth grade, his class was assigned an art project, to make a big turkey for Thanksgiving. He chose to make his turkey with mirrors.
“No one had seen anything like that before,” says Ivan. However, he ended up in the principal’s office because the mirrors were deemed too sharp and dangerous for fifth-graders.
Ivan’s choice of materials was no surprise. Sydney Cash, 80, has tried different artistic mediums throughout his career, but for the past 50 years he’s worked extensively with glass, often molding it into dimensional forms. Many of his sculptures incorporate Flutex, a patterned industrial glass that creates an optical kinetic effect. These sculptural pieces use lights, glass, and mirrors to create mesmerizing interacting patterns of light and shadow. His glass works are displayed in public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. A celebrated sculptor, Sydney, has had over 40 exhibits and earned two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants, the Fellissimo Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
“I think that’s a fun metaphor because it implies that there’s something beautiful in being unique and doing something differently,” says Cash. “But in that case there was also a real danger. The mirror could have cut someone.”
Glass would not become Ivan’s creative medium. Instead, he carried on his family’s artistic tradition with a series of innovative interactive projects, and short films, some of which are displayed at the V&A Museum in London. He’s the recipient of multiple Vimeo Staff Picks and Webby Awards, making the Forbes 30 Under 30 artists list in 2016. Sydney Cash Makes Too Much Art is his first full-length film. His father’s life seemed like a natural choice for a documentary. The film incorporates many interviews with his father and archival footage from Gargoyles, a 1970s documentary.
“My dad might not be a household name as an artist, but I think he’s had an interesting career, and I think that he’s a pretty charismatic personality.’”
The film doesn’t just focus on the sculptor’s artistic legacy. Cash also explores the ways his father’s creative compulsion affected his family. The title is meant to be provocative, but also to warn filmgoers not to expect a conventional artist biopic.
“It’s a much more nuanced kind of a family portrait. It explores the staggering beauty and the sobering cost of devoting your life fully, unequivocally—to anything really—but in this case to art,” says Cash. “I wouldn’t call this a feel-good film. I wouldn’t call it a feel-bad film. It explores a real family and to me there’s the balance of the beauty and making so much art that it’s a little crippling.”
The transition from directing short films involved such a massive learning curve that Cash found it “humbling.”
“I thought when I started that it would take six months,” says Cash. “And I had a certain budget in mind. It took five years, that’s literally 10 times as long.”
But the biggest surprise was not time and money. “I truly did underestimate what going through the process would mean for my relationship with my dad and for my relationship to his art,” says Cash. “Our relationship definitely changed through making the film. I’m very quick to reject any sense of, oh, we have a perfect relationship. It’s far from perfect, it’s definitely complex. Still, there’s no way I would’ve spent that much time with him otherwise.”
The same is true for his father’s life work. “I’m now one of the people who has the best understanding of his artistic archive and his artistic career,” says Cash. “Prior to making this film, there were many years where I refused to go into his studio and really wanted to distance myself from his work because it didn’t interest me. Frankly, it was painful, because I felt like being his son always competed with his work. In making the film, I got to actually really marinate and digest how prolific he’s been as an artist, and that was really powerful and just remarkable.”
For Cash, now raising a child of his own, it has been interesting exploring the subject of balance: How much room can creativity occupy before it crowds out the people you love? His father’s prolific career offers both inspiration and a warning, an inheritance he is still working out how to carry.
