Bob Ebendorf Volume 45.1
SANTA FE BROOCH #1 of stainless steel, mixed media, copper, 7.6 x 1.3 centimeters, 2016. The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Gift of Porter • Price Collection.
TWIG NECKLACE of wood, pearl, 18 karat gold, steel, 50.8 × 59.7 × 5.0 centimeters, circa 1994. Collection of The Mint Museum. Gift of Porter • Price Collection.
BRING IT TOGETHER BROOCH of metal, glass, ceramic, turquoise, ivory, copper, steel, tile grout, 12.5 × 6.6 × 1.6 centimeters, 2000. Collection of The Mint Museum. Gift of Porter • Price Collection.
This romance begins and ends with museums. In 1986, four years after they met, Ron Porter and Joe Price walked out of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and noticed a banner for an exhibition at the new home of the American Craft Museum, right across the street. The show, “Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical,” changed how they thought about art. Each had developed affinities for craft when they were young—Porter with ceramics and Price with jewelry—but after years of gallery hopping together, they had seen almost no craft presented with the same seriousness as traditional fine art. It was not until stepping into the galleries of the American Craft Museum—which put sculptural ceramic vessels, postmodern teapots and narrative furniture—on pedestals, that they recognized that their true, shared passion was craft-based art.
A decade later, a ring in the Susan Cummins Gallery in Mill Valley, California, caught their attention. According to Price, they “had never seen such a thing!,” and to Porter, it “was just unusual enough to tease us.” The gold ring featured a pearl encircled by an old nail, and it fit Price perfectly. They left the gallery with the ring, the knowledge that it was by Robert Ebendorf, and the feeling that they were very cutting edge—this was solid craftsmanship, but that weathered metal was something else. Later that year, at the same gallery, another work by Ebendorf shifted their world. In “The Opera Show,” where jewelry artists interpreted operas, the couple saw a necklace that featured spirals of gold wire and pearls, but mostly it was made of twigs. Rather than representing a character from the stage, this work was made for someone in the audience; it was undeniably ornament for a grande dame. They didn’t purchase it, but they alsocould not stop thinking about it. Twig Necklace began to change how they perceived the borders between jewelry and sculpture and art—maybe they could collect something they did not intend to wear.
In 1998, during his first visit to Penland School of Craft, Porter encountered Ebendorf and told him about the experience with Twig Necklace. Porter was delighted to learn that it was still available (and soon purchased it), and Ebendorf was taken with this collector who remembered a work from two years before so vividly. This meeting sparked a friendship that has evolved and deepened over the subsequent twenty-five years, culminating in the donation from the Porter • Price Collection of a significant number of works by Ebendorf to The Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Ebendorf and his wife Aleta currently reside on the other side of the country in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he volunteers at the Upaya Zen Center, takes “marvelous walks” in the high country, cooks at the local homeless shelter, and, of course, spends time at his workbench. He was born and raised, though, in Topeka, Kansas. As a child, he often visited his paternal grandparents’ tailors’ shop, where he gained an appreciation for materials, style and craftsmanship. He also rode an “artmobile” tricycle dribbled with paint he found in the trash, demonstrating an early predilection for idiosyncratic self-expression. In school, Ebendorf, though challenged academically by undiagnosed dyslexia, excelled in athletics and art. When it came time for college, instead of accepting football scholarships, he decided to pursue metalsmithing at the University of Kansas, where he earned both his BFA (1961) and MFA (1963).
The Mint’s exhibition “Objects of Affection: Jewelry by Robert Ebendorf from the Porter • Price Collection” (on view through February 16, 2025) begins with Ebendorf’s work from his high school and college years, which shows a strong Scandinavian influence, and includes sketches and objects from his time in Norway, first on a Fulbright Fellowship (1963-64) then on a Tiffany Foundation grant (1966-67). Through these educational opportunities, Ebendorf honed the technical skills that supported his subsequent deviations from traditional jewelry design. In 1965, The Mint purchased a sistrum (an ancient Egyptian rattle form) he made, marking the first museum acquisition of his work and contributing to his confidence as a maker.
Ebendorf’s professional career as an educator began in Deland, Florida, where he taught at Stetson University from 1964-67, and then on to Athens, Georgia, where he taught at the University of Georgia from 1967-71. In the late 1960s, Ebendorf began working with found and non-precious materials. He also helped establish SNAG, the Society of North American Goldsmiths. Jewelry historian Toni Greenbaum, in her essay in the “Objects of Affection” catalogue, acknowledges that other artists were working with similar materials, but that unlike their work, which often carried a political or subversive message, Ebendorf’s was guided more by an “aesthetic juxtaposition of diverse materials.” She also underscores the importance—which is easy to forget in today’s hyper-connected world—of peer communities at the time, writing, “Bob ingenuously related that, until meeting Fred (Woell) at the first SNAG conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1970, he assumed he was the only found object jeweler in the United States.”
The exhibition includes works from Ebendorf’s time in the South, as well as his longer tenure at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz, where he taught from 1971-89. His New Paltz-era creations demonstrate an eagerness to collaborate, try new materials, and expand the definition of what jewelry can be. Particularly striking in the gallery are the pair of ColorCore (a plastic laminate from the Formica Corporation) bracelets he made with his then-wife Ivy Ross in the 1980s. Each bracelet is almost eight inches wide and a thin 5/8” deep and features a mosaic of shattered plastic in primary colors with black and white. The use of such fractured elements is a recurring detail in Ebendorf’s work, in part influenced and emphasized by his weekly visits to Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers when he lived in Santa Monica, California, in the early 1990s. Spending his lunch breaks surrounded by this inventive outsider mosaic fantasy world—“totally wacko with joy”—touched his artistic soul. For Ebendorf, broken pieces of safety glass are gems, the printing on shards of Absolut Vodka bottles possess graphic possibilities, and fragments of china offer unlimited palettes.
According to Greenbaum, “combining bits and pieces has been Bob’s definitive style.” Those bits and pieces might be twigs, toys, dice, crushed aluminum cans, vintage rhinestones, old photos, or, as the exhibition demonstrates, squirrel paws, crab claws, bird beaks, and religious tokens—they really might be anything Ebendorf happens across. In the 1990s, Ebendorf created a series of jewelry titled Lost Soul, Found Spirits, that incorporates animal parts. He speaks with levity about how his school-aged daughter reacted when he repeatedly stopped the car in the mornings on the way to her school to snip off parts of roadkill, while curator Rebecca Elliot writes that “these reminders of death subconsciously expressed Ebendorf’s melancholy about the end of his marriage.” Collectors Porter and Price see these works as examples of Ebendorf’s ability to find a community for empty souls. Porter describes him as “the master of ‘there’s no such thing as a castoff,’ ” a designation that applies to both objects and people. That attitude of openness is also embodied by Ebendorf’s works that involve religious imagery, which Elliot describes as part of his “artistic DNA.”
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MODERN CRUCIFIX BROOCH of glass beads, copper, metal, 9.5 × 8.3 × 1.9 centimeters, 2014. The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Gift of Porter • Price Collection.
Religion has been a frequent topic of conversation between Porter and Price, who both grew up in Southern Baptist households, and Ebendorf, who once considered entering the ministry. Of the brooch JC is a Handful (composed of a plastic skeleton arm, crucifix, and vintage jewelry), Elliot explains that it “reflects all three men’s ambivalence about Christianity…with gentle humor.” For Ebendorf, a spiritual approach to life seems to eclipse any specific dogma or doctrine, though the aesthetic power of Christian iconography remains potent.
An important emphasis in the exhibition is Ebendorf’s connection to East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, which demonstrates the significance of personal relationships in his practice. Ebendorf began teaching at ECU in 1997 as a visiting professor, was named the Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Art two years later, and retired in 2016. He is a teacher to his core and finds joy in passing on skills. The students he has mentored through his faculty positions and innumerable workshops are legion.
Greenbaum’s concise assertion that “Bob is beloved,” is reflected in the part of the exhibition devoted to works made by his former students, to a collection of pendants (Bob-bles for Bob) and letters from students and fellow faculty honoring his retirement, and to collaborative works. One collaboration is a necklace from 2016 that Ebendorf made with recent ECU graduate Zachery Lechtenberg. Ebendorf found a cat skull and sent it to Lechtenberg, who added a third eye and graffiti-style drawings of a rat and bones; Ebendorf then added plastic fishing floats to the eye sockets. The skull hangs from a chain comprised mostly of bright green plastic spoons that Ebendorf found, and Lechtenberg decorated. There also are a cast copper Lechtenberg rat head, a costume-jewelry wildcat, and other small elements that contribute to a respectful and playful balance between the artists.
After a visit with Ebendorf at ECU in 2009, Porter and Price decided to collect his work in depth, with archives, and with the intent of placing the collection in a museum, giving him “the same acknowledgement [they] had seen in retrospectives by other ‘Old Masters.’ ” They revealed their plan to Ebendorf in 2012, and he helped them shape the collection. In 2019 The Mint accepted the donation, which more than tripled the museum’s holdings of studio jewelry. The collection includes more than two hundred works by Ebendorf and artists connected to him (especially ECU graduates), papers, correspondence, and extensive recorded interviews. With its focus on his time at ECU and beyond, The Mint’s collection complements an earlier donation Ebendorf made to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
YELLOW BIRD BOLO (detail) by Robert W. Ebendorf and Elsa Bates Freund of steel, sterling silver, mixed media, 19.1 × 8.3 × 2.5 centimeters. The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Gift of Porter • Price Collection.
Included in the exhibition are forty-three of Ebendorf’s distinctive postcard collages—his love letters to creativity. Ebendorf begins each morning at his workbench creating collaged postcards that he mails to friends—mostly other artists (of all ages), collectors, and curators. There are hundreds of the missives in the museum’s collection recording the exchanges between Ebendorf and Price. The two men often collaborated on the postcards, adding layers or drawings to a received postcard before returning it. Porter enjoyed watching Ebendorf draw Price “out of his shell,” and the postcard exchanges grew into larger challenges, with Ebendorf sending boxes filled with jar lids and “doodads,” partially assembled, to engage Price in jewelry making; they continue to exchange boxes, and the resulting works are described as JoeBob jewelry.
Ebendorf speaks passionately about his “journey of curiosity,” and he proclaims (without a blush) the importance of “making love” to his materials. He describes his process as a dance and is uninhibited in his pursuit of wonder. Ron Porter and Joe Price have become important partners in Ebendorf’s jewelry love song waltz (or maybe it’s a disco?). Through their focused and educated collecting—enhanced by their personal connection to the artist—they built an important collection. Through their donation to The Mint Museum, they have ensured the enduring presence of an adored voice in the field of studio jewelry.
SUGGESTED READING
Blauer, Ettagale. 1989 “Robert Ebendorf: A Vision Freely Shared.” Ornament 12(4): 32-39.
Elliot, Rebecca E. and Toni Greenbaum. Objects of Affection: Jewelry by Robert Ebendorf from the Porter • Price Collection. Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum in association with D Giles Limited, 2024.
Brown, Glen R. 2008 “Robert Ebendorf. Gems from the Abyss.” Ornament 31(3): 50-53.
Gore, Caroline, Lena Vigna, Bruce Pepich and Robert Ebendorf. Robert W. Ebendorf: The Work in Depth. Racine, WI: Racine Art Museum, 2014.
Oral history interview with Robert Ebendorf, 2004 April 16-18. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-ebendorf-11967.
“Objects of Affection: Jewelry by Robert Ebendorf from the Porter • Price Collection” is on view through February 16, 2025 at the Mint Museum Randolph, 2730 Randolph Road, Charlotte, North Carolina 28207. You can visit the Mint Museum’s website at www.mintmuseum.org.
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Ashley Callahan is an independent scholar and curator in Athens, Georgia, with a specialty in modern and contemporary American decorative arts. She has an undergraduate degree from Sewanee and a Master’s degree in the history of American decorative arts from the Smithsonian and Parsons. Her publications include Frankie Welch’s Americana: Fashion, Scarves, and Politics (UGA Press, 2022), Southern Tufts: The Regional Origins and National Craze for Chenille Fashion (UGA Press, 2015), and, as co-author, Crafting History: Textiles, Metals, and Ceramics at the University of Georgia (Georgia Museum of Art, 2018). She appreciates Bob Ebendorf’s belief in the importance of museums, and smiles when he says, “I can get unstuck by visiting a museum!” Stuck or not, visiting “Objects of Affection” at The Mint Museum is inspiring. Callahan’s son Copper, who stayed up late drawing designs for jewelry after seeing the show, agrees.
