Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America

Interview with Robert Ebendorf
Conducted by Tacey Rosolowski
At the Artist's home in Greenville, North Carolina
April 16-18, 2004

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Robert Ebendorf on April 16-18, 2004. The interview took place in Greenville, North Carolina and was conducted by Tacey Rosolowski for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America.

Robert Ebendorf and Tacey Rosolowski have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written prose.

Interview

TACEY ROSOLOWSKI: This is Tacey Ann Rosolowski interviewing Robert Ebendorf at his home in Greenville, North Carolina, on the 16th of April, 2004. I’m conducting this interview for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. This is disk number one.

As an innovator in American jewelry since the 1960s you have been one of the leaders in exploring alternative materials and also – at least in a general sense – in pioneering that most American of jewelry forms, narrative jewelry. In addition, craftspeople in all media, as well as curators and collectors, refer to you as a consummate networker, one who has brought as much passion to building up the field and its human resources as you have to your own artwork. I want to ask you now, what are your reflections on the richness that you have brought to your field over these years?

ROBERT EBENDORF: On this spring morning, looking out the front door in April in Greenville, North Carolina, the trees are just beginning to show their greenery, and it brings the thinking about birth and brings the thinking about growth, and the question is many faceted, much like a gemstone: rough and some highly polished. But I would think maybe a gift that I’ve been able to share is a gift that I’ll return to so many that have gifted me with technique, thinking, scholarly pursuit, helping work with organizations, finding the richness of the museum that is an archive of history, and let us say particularly in the metal field. So it’s like a piece of fabric woven with many threads, and perhaps I’m just one of those threads that weave in that tapestry that brings a vision and brings an image forward.

In the field, in metal, I would say here in America, has had a rich and a humble beginning, but when we think about the jewelry history and the metal history, many of those first-generation makers came from – extracted – particularly from Europe and from the U.K. and brought those techniques and information, and that began to, again, like a tree, grow and set its roots, and here I find myself in the – in the early ‘50s and the late ‘40s beginning to explore this idea of making – making things out of metal and wood and working in clay and exploring the creative journey.

And it has unfolded with many facets and with many turns, with its dark tunnels and also to its illuminations of pleasure and joy, and the feeling of being a part of a family. And that family is both history, coming from many, many cultures, but it’s also a family of mentors and my now contemporary – and also the students that I’ve had the richness to dance with, to be in the midst of their wonder and their leadership; around a table talking about ideas and design and making, or talking about historical technique that has been lost to scratching the surface to polishing it once again and bring it forth with a new voice, with a new pair of hands.

What I really find very fascinating is that the tools that I’m working with that are on my workbench at the moment, many of these tools are the same tools that have been found on the workbenches around the world in many, many centuries back.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What are some of those tools?

MR. EBENDORF: Well, the pliers, the hammer, the vice, the anvil, fire to warm the metal, to melt the metal. So it is a lineage and, again, it’s handed down. And then if we go to the technical vocabulary, that also has been handed down from master to apprentice, apprentice to the next – who becomes a master and then to the next apprentice, and we in America really haven’t experienced that apprentice journey in history like we have read about and know about in other cultures, particularly in the European and in Asia.

So the techniques are also many of the techniques we use today. Let’s throw a word out like granulation or niello or – those are two good examples – champ levé enamels, cloisonné, plique à jour. Many of those techniques are being reinvestigated by the young contemporary and pushing the parameters of history and pushing the parameters of that technique, and breaking rules or making strange things that – where do those objects fit in context and in the fabric of our history? And those stories will be unfolded by scholars and by research as we travel forward.

So I do feel that sense of family, and I honor that and I feel very fortunate to be a part of that family.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: You talk often about – you often use the word journey when you speak about process, when you speak about the pathways that you have taken in discovering new materials, so I’m coupling here in my mind the words journey and family, and wondering – you’ve taken a particular kind of journey to your contemporary family of students and peers and connections in the craft world, and I’m wondering, how did that journey begin? What was your journey, beginning with your family background and where you were born?

MR. EBENDORF: You touched a wonderful nerve of memory and reviewing. When I spoke about parting of a family and of the craft being handed down, I oftentimes think about growing up as a young man – as a young person and as a child in Topeka, Kansas, and on Saturdays my father would take me down to, believe it or not, my grandmother and grandfather’s tailors’ shop, and the connection – let’s put the dots together. Here are two people, a husband and wife, a team, a collaborative team in Topeka, Kansas – Swiss woman, German man. What are they doing? They’re cutting cloth. What is she doing? She’s making – sewing button holes, doing detailing on the clothing that my grandfather is putting together, this new pair of pants or a formal three-piece suit.

I can remember as a small boy being put up on the cutting board in the tailor shop and big bolts of fabric my grandfather would pull down. I can still hear – [makes noise] – coming down and showing me, well, this is the new – the new tweed, or, this is the new flannel that’s coming this fall, and the cardboard maquettes. But behind the – not the counter but behind the table there was my grandmother sitting there with a hot iron and pressing and pinning the patterns down and cutting with these big, long shears.

So connect the dots here. So here all of a sudden I think about that journey, and here are two craftsman, making love to the materials that they are speaking and making objects, objects that end up on the body, that end up adorning the body, and here I am at 65 adorning the body, or making objects that speak about my passions, speak about the craft.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So you were soaking up that whole tradition from a very early age. How old were you when you were visiting your grandparents’ workshop?

MR. EBENDORF: Those memories can take me to probably five – four or five, six years old.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Wow, that’s very early. And when were you born, Bob?

MR. EBENDORF: I was born in 1938, September 30th, Topeka, Kansas, son of – my father was in medicine, a doctor, and my mother was a wonderful mom, taking care of the house, nurturing the family, doing the washing and all those things that made my life easy – my sister’s and mine as we were growing up.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What were your parents’ names?

MR. EBENDORF: Mother’s name was Nomah Large and my father’s name was Harry Ebendorf, and the – don’t know that much about my mother’s side because the family broke up quite early, but I have many fond memories of my grandparents on my father’s side, the tailors, and their victory garden outside of town, planting potatoes, picking the berries, having iced watermelon in the backyard on a late Sunday afternoon after working in the garden, and we had our bushel basket of fresh vegetables from the garden to take home to wash and to can and to take care of, and chickens in the backyard with my grandmother gathering – and some of the fond memories of – again, of family and of sharing something that is joyful is sitting in the kitchen with my grandmother making homemade noodles and dumplings for to do with the chicken that we had just freshly killed from the chicken pen, or gathering – sending me out on Saturday morning with the basket to gather the eggs from the henhouse.

And having those memories, I feel very fortunate, because today in our contemporary society, not that those are lost but our young people today, it’s a different time and it’s a different – there’s a different voice going on and it’s a different time. But I think that growing older has – with all the battle scars and the notches in my cane, the celebrations and the darkness, I have enjoyed becoming more senior and looking back, and also hopefully being a bit wiser and making better choices and better decisions about things.

The making of and the – the sense of the arts creeping into that, into the bloodstream and into the parameters of life, really probably I do have some photographs from the newspaper of taking the Saturday watercolor class in our town, but not much memory of that, but where the memory comes in about the craft or the arts was basically – really began to become more of an awareness in high school, in the junior or senior year of high school, being a very good athlete – but let’s move back to grade school.

The disasters started because of the learning disabilities that at that time, not knowing much about, but there were times when it would be time to advance to the next class, next level like from grade school to – you know, from 1st grade to 2nd grade; I had to be put back several times because of – I couldn’t handle – or I wasn’t doing well in school.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What was your learning disability?

MR. EBENDORF: And, you know, at that time I had a – they didn’t know anything about dyslexia complications that young people oftentimes encounter, so reading was very difficult for me, and even if you give me your phone number today I can probably give you the first three numbers but I’ll have to write it down. So in my wallet I carry, you know, all the phone numbers that are the immediate – of importance, and I still struggle a great deal with reading and assembling information. Now, this we can talk more about. Maybe this is why the helter-skelter in some of the things I make today sometimes have been talked about, that I create my own language.

But going back to that grade school time, because where could I excel? I excelled in playing baseball, in the athletic field, and into high school the same – junior high the same thing. So I became a very good athlete, a very strong athlete, and I just hung on in the academics.

When I took the arts and crafts class instead of taking auto mechanics where a lot of the difficult and the renegades would hang out and chop cars and put in new mufflers and cam the cars and channel chop, et cetera, I was upstairs working with a piece of clay and chip carving on wood, and beginning to learn something about working in copper.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: How come you didn’t take the macho chop-the-cars course?

MR. EBENDORF: You know, maybe – I think my dear mother getting me up at 10:00 in the evening and – my sister and I, in our pajamas, and, “come outside and take a look; the moon is beautiful tonight. Look at the clouds passing over.” She’d scratch my butt or pat me on the head, very physical, but those tender moments of nature and the gift that Mother Goddess gives us, she would call that to our attention, and gathering bittersweet in the fall in the countryside or going out and gathering the wildflowers where the old farmhouses used to be and bring them back. So it was a great sensitivity that my mother shared with the family. And I think that was shown artistically; I think that was the sensitive vein that she was massaging and sharing with me, not as an artist but more the observation and looking and seeing the subtle nuances and the beauty in that little detail: the bark, the rings on the – of the cut-down tree. And so –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It seems also, too, that you had a window into different processes by going to the workshop and seeing the fabric being worked, the button holes being made, and then with – I love the image of your grandmother getting her hands into the noodle or dumpling dough, and here you are later on, a few years later taking classes in metal, which is an ooey-gooey form and also clay, which is another kind of plastic form. So it seems as though you were being nudged in that direction. You had a comfort level with getting your hands in those sorts of materials.

MR. EBENDORF: I have to laugh when you say a few things like this because it does – woof, without getting too emotional, it does push me back in the memory of going to my grandparent’s home on a weekend –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Oh, you are getting emotional about this. [Laughs.]

MR. EBENDORF: Yes. Oops, watch out now. [Laughs.]

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Oh, no, that’s good.

MR. EBENDORF: I wear my –

[Cross talk.]

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: That’s nice.

MR. EBENDORF: – on my cuff and –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: You know you’re getting to the good stuff there.

MR. EBENDORF: But, you know, that quiet time when my grandmother would sit me on the floor and bring from her bedroom the huge button box – remember those old tin button boxes? You know, and I’d take off that lid and there would be all these mounds of buttons, all different color, and she would give me a piece of – golly, I hadn’t thought about that – she would give me a piece of the fabric and a needle and thread. I’d sit there and pick out the buttons I wanted and sew them, you know, randomly on that piece of fabric. Or, the other – you know, as a boy, a young boy, walking into her bedroom and all of a sudden on her – I guess it was called a – on her dresser there were all these instruments, you know, for combing the hair and these strange things, the hairpins, and then there was this strange object that was – it was a Bakelite – I didn’t know the word Bakelite but there was this strange thing, round with a hole in the center with all this hair coming out of it, and I couldn’t – but now I know that what it was is when you would comb the hair you would take – take the loose hair in the comb, and what did the ladies do with it? They stuffed it in these little jars that were on their dresser, and it was – but I remember seeing that and the hair kind of coming out of this hole, and I thought, that is very strange; what – I didn’t know what and how it got there.

But, yes, process, materials, making noodles, putting the flour on the table and rolling out the noodles and letting me have the knife, and cut them, and all of a sudden watch them go into the boiling water, and preparing the radishes for the table and the vegetables from the garden. So process, now that we speak about process, and here I am at 65 having this joyful time of process and contextualizing process.

So the nudging was very quietly there, and maybe I hadn’t thought about it in that context, but the grandparents did play – and that’s why I think grandparents to children, hopefully that children have that opportunity to have those growing up times with one of the grandparents, family side, or maybe both of them, because they are a real treat to the early, early journeying and grounding of family – not family values but family. I mean, the way each family has their own values.

But I would – I had a very good childhood but I did have academic struggles, and that was an embarrassment for me because I didn’t do well in that area, and it caught up with me along into the college days definitely.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: But it sounds as though – I mean, you clearly bring an emotional charge to these different processes. You got very emotional talking about these memories of your grandparents, and so, process for you is noticing these wonderful aesthetic things, for getting your hands in stuff and sewing or making noodle dough, that has this family context, this emotional richness, so it seems a natural step when you’re in junior high to step into the classroom and feel comfortable and excited and joyful about exploring a process in new materials.

What kinds of materials did you explore in those junior high courses? How did that take you to the next step in your journey?

MR. EBENDORF: I do remember – and I still have – in my little box of family I still have those copper earrings with the early sawing piercing, and I have the first ring that I made in silver with a chip stone that I – that is now broken; sandstone, which is very soft. But I remember in the arts and crafts class there was one time when she would put the box – a wooden box down, and we’ll take – with our Exacto-knives we would do what we call chip carving, negative and positive, and I think we could create our own design patterns and we would trace them onto the soft box and then do that. But I do remember very much about the jewelry, and that was where – mostly working with copper, and then, since I seemed to take to it more ferociously than maybe some of the other people in the class, I graduated to – “graduated” to mean I stepped out of the copper and into starting to explore buying silver and making simple earrings and rings in silver.

And then the crescendo was that one of the other teachers wanted to have a gold ring made, and my high school art teacher was celebrating this young boy in the class, Bob, and said, “Well, you know, Bob could make this ring for you and could set that cameo – family cameo that you wanted to set in this gold ring” –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Your first commission.

MR. EBENDORF: Right. The teacher bought the gold, we got the cameo, came back and built the ring I did, then came time to set the cameo. And so she – the teacher was helping me, and of course I slipped with the tool and all of a sudden the teacher put her hand over this – and, “Oh! Oh!” and I thought, what happened? Well, I slipped and cracked the cameo. Then she – teacher – sent me down the hall with the broken cameo and the ring to go to the other teacher and explain to her that I just broke the family heirloom. So I do remember that experience as –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Tell me what you remember about that. How did you make that confrontation?

MR. EBENDORF: Well, the sadness of the – at the end of the hall, walking in and putting the broken cameo in front of the teacher that owned it, and apologizing and so forth.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: How did she respond?

MR. EBENDORF: She responded, I'm sure, with not anger but sadness as well, and realized that I was kind of caught between the middle, and definitely she lost a family heirloom of something that was precious to her, or had memory, and it was in the ring but it definitely had a crack all the way across it.

But I think that this woman, as I think back of major pinpoints, she connected that first dot in where my self esteem, along with the athletics and getting all these awards in football and wrestling, gave myself in that high school days a position, even though I was having a lot of academic problems, but I was being focused athletic-wise, which is always very special in high school. If you’re not on student government or in the king of queen of the prom, athletics is always – not a second but is always high in that – high of acceptance and celebrated.

So I think that was – and I can remember going back and visiting Fabian Wolf – my high school teacher’s name – and wanting – because I had gone on to the University of Kansas [Lawrence, Kansas] to study art instead of taking the full scholarships to the Air Academy for wrestling and football, or to the University of Oklahoma for football or wrestling, or the University of Nebraska. And it turned out those full scholarships that – I told my father that I wanted to go to the University of Kansas, which was 35 miles away, and enter the school of art, and not too sure where that was going to take me but I wanted to know something more about making jewelry. I enjoyed that, so I was going to pursue that as a freshman and not take the full scholarships. I knew that if I went on scholarship to play athletics or to be a part of the athletic program that – I had enough problems academically and so forth; I knew that I couldn’t split the energy between the two because I was pushed so hard competitive-wise in the athletic arena. So –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Was it –

MR. EBENDORF: Hmm?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: I’m sorry. Was it difficult to make the decision between athletics and art?

MR. EBENDORF: It was between my father being proud that I would get a scholarship doing something that I had gotten a lot of recognition in the paper, and entirely sought after or celebrated, and to – going into an area of art, which – I think he was more concerned about, where would this take me? I mean, I’m a doctor, I’m comfortable with what we’re doing, and I want my son to be happy, but where would going to the art department, where would this maybe take me?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So that was really a first major decision that you made for yourself, to make your own path.

MR. EBENDORF: Very true. And taking that – taking that, not risk, but definitely stepping into the unknown to a certain extent, not having any idea about where the success or financial remuneration, or even where it would take me or what I would do with it, except it was something that I wanted to look into.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And what did that feel like? I mean, how did you know? What was making your inner compass point to A for art?

MR. EBENDORF: I think that high school art teacher.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And this was Fabian Wolf?

MR. EBENDORF: Fabian, who patted me on the head. And there was another thing that happened there that was, again, key by Fabian – by the teacher. At the Topeka High School, as any strong high school, the recruitment time came place – took place, where the University of Kansas – the universities would send a representative of the university. Well, it just happened to be that since there were a lot of people going to the University of Kansas – anyway, there was – arrived on the high school we were going to have a day with the University of Kansas professor – two professors from the art department and the drawing and painting department, and they were to come and give us the morning. So when they were to appear, Fabian Wolf said, “Bob, when Carlyle Smith – Professor Smith comes, I want you to – you’re going to be in charge of taking his slides and setting up the projector and being sure the chairs are set up.” So she gave me a position; she gave me a sense of worthiness that I had a responsibility to welcome this person or to be in the midst of the moment.

And the class came, was set. Carlyle Smith showed his slides, talked about the University of Kansas, the school or art, design department and the drawing and painting department, and then after it was over with the students all went on to other classes. I was able to stay back and give him his slides. And of course Fabian is, “Oh, by the way, Carlyle, let me show you what Bob has been working on.” So there was some little metal things that I’d made. And Carlyle said to me, “Well, you know, eventually you all are invited – your high school is invited, for your field trip, to come to the University of Kansas for the morning, to come through on campus and have the day. And when you come, please come and look me up and I’d like to say hello, but you are going to visit the school of art,” and I said, “Yes.”

So, a big bus comes three weeks later; we go over, we go to the school of art – well, it was called the design department because it was a division between the design department and the drawing and painting department. But anyway, we walked through the halls with a guide, and the guide said, this is the ceramics room, and this is the textile – this is the weaving department, and these are the design rooms, and – you know, walking through the hall. And of course we went to the metal – to the jewelry studio, and we went in and we all stood around like pegs in a game board, and stood there, and they said, this is the jewelry – and Carlyle recognized me. He said, “Bob, how are you?” He came over and welcomed me a bit and showed me some attention. He said, “Oh, by the way, you’re going to have the afternoon free before the bus goes back.” He said, “If you want to come back to the jewelry studio, please come back and just hang out here until the bus leaves.” And I said, “Well, thank you.”

So of course we were free to go to the union to have lunch, and we did. The girls were all in their heels and their crinolines, and their feet were hurting so they took off their shoes and just hung out watching all the college boys and girls walking through the student union. But I grabbed my sandwich and I walked back over to the jewelry studio and walked in, and Carlyle said, “Oh, here, Bob, sit down here.” And he put one of the graduate students on me and sat down and showed me what they were doing and said, “Oh, would you like to make something this afternoon while you’re here?” So they got this metal there and – so when I walked out of there I’d made a ring in the studio.

So, getting back on the bus I’m sure that – feeling somewhat personally welcomed and also going to the studio and hands-on again, the material, and the process of filing, sawing, and soldering, and here I am with these college people and I can be with them and I understood what was going on, and I could contribute; they could give.

So I think that when you ask the question, was it a hard decision, I think when I came home I was a convert. I came home and said to my dad, “I really want to go to the University of Kansas and not do the scholarship thing but I would like to go through the art department and take some classes.”

So I think the decision came very easily for me in that context.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It was really just a no-brainer at that point.

MR. EBENDORF: Yeah, and – you know, but again, where that would unfold was still totally a dark mystery – or not a dark mystery but it was a mystery, except I knew that you would get an advisor and I knew that they would help you take certain classes and the doors would open up and things would unfold and we’d see where the journey would take us.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So what year did you begin at the University of Kansas?

MR. EBENDORF: You know, it must have been ‘50s – I don’t know. I don’t remember; it’s very foggy. I don’t know if it was the late ‘40s or the early ‘50s – something like ’52 or ’53, I think.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: But when you began it was what you expected, or were there –

MR. EBENDORF: Yes. I mean, all of a sudden there was a course called design. There was a course in sculpture. There was a – yeah, it was – the book opened up with many more chapters than I ever had experienced before. The one course that I do remember that was very special – and it goes back to – again, about that process of visualization and visually awareness of your environment. There was a course that I thought was a very, very important course that I experienced as a freshman. It was called Nature Museum Study, and what it was was we learned to start sharpening pencils and we first worked in graphite, then we went to ink, then we went to watercolor, and then we could go to mixed media. But the first semester was nature museum drawing only in graphite pencil, and we would bring in vegetables and we would sit there and look at the surfaces and with our pencil we’d try, in two-inch by two-inch squares, or maybe it was four-inch by four-inch squares, we would visually look at the pine cone or the piece of bark and try to capture with our pencils – to emulate the surface textures.

So what this was doing – or maybe it was a blade of grass, or maybe it was the tulip, and we would take off one of the petals and she would say, look at such and such an area, and she’d actually have us cut out a square – a small two-inch by two-inch square and put that piece of paper with that little opening over that segment. We’d have to try to draw that. So it was that careful recording, visually being aware of what I would think maybe would just be a branch but all of a sudden realize that branch was made up of all these component parts.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Yeah, discovering worlds within worlds, kind of, and focusing your attention.

MR. EBENDORF: And then that was about design, and she would fold in – you know, look at the patterning, look at the shading, look at the textile quality versus the smooth part of the surface.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So that was really teaching you how to see, and then –

MR. EBENDORF: Absolutely.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: – and then the hand-eye coordination too.

MR. EBENDORF: Absolutely. And just think about if you were to zero in with a microscope or with a magnifying glass on the orange – on an orange – not open it up, just on an orange. So she would have us make that close-up observation, then midway in the class she’d say, “Now open the orange up,” and we’d have to draw the inside peel instead of the outside peel.

So it was that visualization, that coordination, that surface awareness, and trying to make it look real.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Now, did you feel – when you were doing those exercises in the context of the class, how did you feel the impact of that in other courses, or just in daily life as you related to objects? In other words, how did those seeing skills –

MR. EBENDORF: Those seeing skills took the world – I mean, particularly outside the art department – took the world around me and gave it such – it just vibrated in so many different ways than I’ve ever experienced before, even though I thought I was somewhat sensitive to the environment, but it gave me – it talked about spatial relationships; it spoke about instead of looking at the tree as a whole, I began to realize that tree was made up of all these component parts. So it kind of broke down a lot of things and put them not into categories, but it gave me a bigger picture of the component parts that make up a whole.

But in my other class work, I mean, I struggled through printmaking, life drawing – not good, hard. Life drawing was not – I was not skilled, didn’t do well in that. But printmaking, acid etching, the copper plates and doing intaglio and learning the language and some of those ABC techniques. As I think back, they all – the University of Kansas did me well. They really did a good job as a four-year undergraduate experience, and I celebrate that gift very much, and then I also did stay on for the two years for the graduate program as well. I tried for scholarships to go away to graduate school but nothing evolved and at the last minute – and money was not there, but at the last minute – I mean, I wasn’t aware that the graduate program oftentimes had assistantships for graduate people to teach the freshman design classes and drawing classes and at the same time be working on your graduate degree, which was called the MFA. And I was awarded – or was asked if I would like to stay on to do my graduate work in jewelry at that time, because that’s where I have really become more focused.

So I didn’t go away. And the sad note, hindsight, I probably would have enrichened the fabric if I would have been able to have gone away because I would have had different instructors, different challenges, and I would not have known how to navigate where I wanted to go, who I wanted to work with, and it was an easier journey than it would have been if I would have been relocated and rechallenged.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It’s true that often graduate programs have, you know, a kind of unspoken policy of not taking undergraduates from their own departments for exactly that reason.

MR. EBENDORF: And I’m livid today – and I’ve been livid – after returning – unfortunately returning to the academic circle many years later, boy, am I one that will be cantankerous on that topic when all of a sudden someone say, you know, “Jerry was very good; why don’t we – we have an adjunct position to let them” – you know, not adjunct but a – and I have been very vicious on, “No, make them go,” and –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Fly the nest.

MR. EBENDORF: I should have – I could have – I would have had a richer investment of my time if I would have done that.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: As you look back on that period, however, are there certain pieces, certain objects that you made that you remember and that seem to speak to you about what was going to come?

MR. EBENDORF: Validation. In Kansas, if you go into the history of the decorative arts in the mid-50s and the ‘60s, there were several very strong – and ‘70s – for example, the “Fiber, Clay, Metal” exhibitions at St. Paul were very important, I think, in the decorative arts for the crafts in the ‘60s. In Kansas there was the “Wichita National” competition, and that took place in Wichita, Kansas, and there is a rich history of this period of time, and that exhibition was a competition, and people from all over the United States could send in their slides, and they were juried, and then the exhibition would take place, and it was quite – and fortunately it was only – you know, I am in Lawrence, Kansas, it’s in Wichita, Kansas, and all the major makers that were interested in the exhibition of the programming would send in for this. And I can remember being accepted twice as a graduate student to the “Wichita National” Exhibition.

We then would also take a field trip down and take a look. And here I’d see pieces by John Paul Miller, Fred Miller, I'm speaking now of metal – or Ron Pearson, Earl Kretsinger (sic). These are – or Mary Kretsinger and Earl Krentzin. These are icons in our metal – in America metalwork of the ‘60s and mid-‘50s.

But anyway, having my pieces chosen for these exhibitions, the proudness of quietly standing at the exhibition seeing my ring or my piece from the workshop in Lawrence, Kansas amongst these icons, amongst this exhibition, I think those were some things that – the question I can remember, the quiet smile, and a sense of, not success but acknowledgement, validation, giving me permission to journey on, or that there was something happening that was being recognized outside of my professors or teachers about art. It was someone who chose my piece to be amongst this exhibition called the juror.

But, yes, I can remember – when you asked about objects, or whatever – so I do remember that experience and that – I can remember several of the kind of things I made, and –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What did some of them look like? I’m wondering what the jurors were seeing and what excited them.

MR. EBENDORF: The piece that I remember very quickly where they were filed in wax and then sterling silver cast with – the ring and earrings and cufflinks that were then inlaid with ebony and ivory, and for the color differences between – using the wood and the bone of the ivory. At that time ivory was used a great deal before it became something of an endangered species. But that and also to a raised nut bowl – sterling nut bowl with a forged spoon, which I still own today. So those are objects that I do particularly remember from that.

I remember fondly my ceramic classes with Sheldon Carey. I remember also the sculpture class with Eldon Teft, who was at the University of Kansas, and the warm classes with Robert Montgomery in design and three-dimensional design. He also taught jewelry and metal work, and of course the mornings of conversation with Carlyle Smith, who was the head of the metal program at that time.

When I chose to do the graduate program, knowing that – I thought I would be hopeful about maybe getting a teaching job, but because at the University of Kansas we didn’t have a lot of experience or input about designing for companies or working at a jewelry store or shop, it was – at that time too, teaching was quite fluid for many – that was available because there were all – if you remember at that time they were building art departments and flourishing in the applied arts after the GI bill.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: The GI bill, yep.

MR. EBENDORF: That was flourishing, and then also the OT, the occupational therapy classes for returning from the military.

Anyway, so I knew that maybe I’d do my graduate work in three-dimensional design with an emphasis on jewelry. And why I chose to do that was if I had chose that route I would have to take many other kinds of classes and not just focus at making jewelry. So that was going to make my nest larger with more eggs in the nest for potentially being more attractive. I had a strong background of working with ceramics and also working with silk screening, and also working with metal and also working with sculpture.

So I took this journey in graduate school in three-dimensional design with an emphasis in metal. So when I finished, my portfolio, or my slides and my vocabulary, was quite broad versus – but with the strongest voice of course within the metal. So I kind of put that thought together, thinking that would be more attractive maybe for a small junior college or a college or a university academic position.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It was very savvy. Is that an idea you came up with on your own or did you get advice?

MR. EBENDORF: I think I came up – I think – I don’t remember being counseled all that well about what was going to happen afterwards, but I took – maybe because there were a number of teachers that I experienced – again, going back to the undergraduate and here I am in the same bedroom with the same people – there were certain teachers that I’d had that I wanted to have more time with, so one was in clay and one was over here, so I chose to continue to have more time with them. Now that you ask, that, I think, jaded into that decision-making process.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Well it was certainly – I mean, I’m struck by the strength of your decision, having gotten an athletic scholarship to go to one place and you turning that down, saying no, I’m going to follow what I want to do and go to the University of Kansas for art – [audio break, tape change] – and then as a graduate student, a beginning graduate student, when most beginning graduate student really don’t know what end is up, but you making a very savvy decision to not focus yourself too narrowly but to remain broad so that you’re marketable later on. There’s a real survival strength there, a real attentiveness, however subtle it is, to what’s going on in the market, the world around you, the practicalities of the world.

MR. EBENDORF: You know, because there wasn’t much talk, I mean, with the teachers, of trying to scrape back into that – there wasn’t much talk about what are you going to do with it and where are you going to go. It was just like –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It was there.

MR. EBENDORF: They were good teachers but it seemed like it just kind of ended at the end of the piece of paper, and what was the next – on the next page was kind of like – I don’t remember being – like here today we’re coaching all the way, like, how do you survive? And so we’re talking much about game plan, the five-year plan. You know, they’re doing wonderful in the studio but I would like to see them continue to be successful, so that we do spend – and I think not only myself but I think a lot of good professors or good people in the academic field do network and do think about how can we send these young men and women out into the creative field to exist?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Well, as you’re talking through your decision-making process at these critical periods, I guess – even though you didn’t know the impact of your decisions, what I’m seeing is the hints of what’s going to come, which is that you are a person who’s really moving and shaking in the field; you’re always thinking, okay, I’m in my studio but my world does not end at the studio walls. There’s a bigger world out there full of people and things that are going to be happening – shows in the next few years, more jobs to take, more experiences to have. So I’m seeing that coming, and you nurturing that in yourself.

MR. EBENDORF: Well, to jump ahead a little bit because you hit a point – yesterday I overheard you speaking to some of the students as we walked through the studio and I heard you speaking about – it seems like oftentimes the maker, let’s say of ceramics or let’s say a weaver or let’s say a metal person, we know that field, but that particular creative problem solving and skill oftentimes we don’t – the student doesn’t often know that they might be able to knock on other doors instead of just going out and throwing another pot, but taking that skill and working in industry in a think tank of materials – that we’re discarding these materials but as a creative person, this technology lab hires you to – because you’re skilled at precision work.

And my antenna kind of went up because I think your astute observation is absolutely true, that unfortunately today so many of the students have tunnel vision. I’m making – I’m going to talk about jewelry – I’m making jewelry and when I get out of here, that’s why I prepared myself to make jewelry. But they don’t realize that they can work for an architect – because they’re used to building models and working with materials they can go and work for a machine shop because they have precision making equipment, because they know materials, they know nuances and detail and precision. Anyway, so we are oftentimes missing – missing the bigger picture.

But going back to Kansas to the university for a moment, there were some things that – that were gifted and very special. Because I was struggling in the academic circle so much with taking the language – the psychology classes and the philosophy classes and the art history and the English classes and so forth, and I’d have to write papers and themes and so forth, and oftentimes I’d be getting these marks back with failing marks on them or Ds, and of course our advisors or our faculty always had printouts of where we were academically in case they needed to call us in and talk about why are you failing art history, or what’s going on here? I can see that you’re having some bad marks. And that was my case of having some disasters in some of these classes, and one of my professors, who I had also enjoyed his leadership as teacher, Robert Montgomery, he would oftentimes say, “Bob,” he said, “The next time you have to write a theme or the next time you have to write an art history paper,” he says, “you call me and come to my office because I want to read it over with you, because you’re failing and you can’t do that. We need to – so come talk to me.”

So he had this open door, and when I would write something I could always go to him and lay it before him and feel totally comfortable with being – with a bad – totally naked with a poor document, and he would say, “look,” circle this. And he said, “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. This is a dangling participle, this doesn’t – this sentence or paragraph doesn’t flow.” So he would literally make me rework and then bring it back and rework and bring it back before I handed it in so that I would continue to stay academically out of trouble.

So his nurturing and help did make a lot of difference sometimes where the marks were getting thin at times.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: You had mentioned earlier that when you were in high school and even in elementary school – as early as elementary school you felt a sense of shame about how you slipped in certain areas even though you excelled in others. And I’m wondering, did this experience with Robert Montgomery make you feel differently about the learning disorder? Had it been named dyslexia at that point or did you as yet –

MR. EBENDORF: I don’t think it had, no.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Okay.

MR. EBENDORF: What it did give – it gave me a haven. It gave me a place where I could come in comfortably, knowing that the piece was – the document – the paper was in trouble because of spelling or because of English – the proper situation. And what it gave me is an opportunity to come in and lay the paper down, and even though it had all these red marks over it, not feel ashamed or not – all I had to do is go back and try to rework it. And so there was a support system that made me feel comfortable.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And a sense of control, too, because it wasn’t, you know, you blew it once, you got another chance, you can get control over it. If you blow it that time you can make it a little better. Keep going back.

You said that the dyslexia makes it very difficult to read. You have difficulty remembering sequences of things. Do you see the influence of the thought process that creates those difficulties? Do you see those thought processes feeding your artwork in any way, in a positive sense or a negative sense?

MR. EBENDORF: I see it feeding it. And I think – I don’t know if it’s a positive or a negative, but I do see – with that critical question, because – why I should say that is that oftentimes when I’m writing letters – I’ve had other people who are writing about my work, or essays, or people doing a critical observation of the work, where sometimes they feel that my helter-skelterness and my sense of being out of control or not being legible – I’ll swing the other way and all of sudden start doing collages in the letter or start drawing. And today if I’m writing a letter personally – even professionally if I’m writing a letter – you know, I don’t do the computer and I enjoy the Pony Express. I love putting a stamp on the letter and running down in front and seeing the cloud of smoke coming – here comes the pony – and I know that – I’d reach up and give him the letter as the rider goes by. It’s on its way; it’s traveling. And I still love the hand. Is it about the marks? I bet it is. I love making these marks.

So oftentimes I will jumble things up. If I’m writing a stream of conscious – I’m writing to you; if I often get blocked because I don’t know how to spell a word, I’ll just go ahead and write it what I think it is. And if I go to the dictionary and I’m trying to find a word because I know I can’t spell it, I don’t even know how to phonetically or the – I am impaired there. I don’t even know how – so the dictionary sometimes is extremely frustrating to me to try to look up the word because I don’t know how to sound it out or where the letters are. So that’s really how frightening – the fear sometimes when I am put a document in front of me and he says, “Read this to 500 people,” et cetera, whatever, it brings the sweat to my brow and I will do anything I can to dodge that bullet, but I’ve gotten – I’ve dealt with this for a length of time so you would never know this from my verbal skills or the way I handle myself because I’m able to compensate that; I know how to move around that, navigate around that barrier or that challenge.

So, going back to this in relationship to the work, I think when one views my work, oftentimes the work is very erratical, very spontaneous and very asymmetrical, laden with information or maybe over-the-hill – maybe too much glitz on it, and I think there is a relationship there, that the helter-skelterness or the going against the grain and being – throwing a twist in there maybe is a part of that association and assemblage of ideas and assemblage of information. Maybe I’m skirting around – maybe I’m not making sense in what I’m trying to express, but I think that it has – I love collaging. Why do you collage? I love putting things down and marking back over it and rebuilding that surface and contextualizing working around, and I think part of it is I’m creating my own language. Several scholars who have looked in-depth at the work of – I remember someone quoting them as saying – them saying Bob creates his own language. The marks and the scratches and the collaging is his way of – his language that he creates that. And as I think about some of the – how I like to inlay and – take a broken plate and take it and then take the broken glass from the street and start laying these like little bricks into the matrix of the piece of jewelry, it is like building the Byzantine chapels with all the wonderful mosaics.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It’s also the part-whole relationships that you learned about – learned to see in a new way in the museum drawing course as well.

MR. EBENDORF: Yes.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So I can understand. I don’t think – I think what you’re saying makes perfect sense. I mean, as you were speaking about your letters and this combination of text and images – because often you have to write on a postcard, or you take a photocopy of some kind of poster and then you write in the empty spaces around the poster so you’re always juxtaposing words and images, and I thought immediately when you brought up your letters of the assemblage pieces, the Off the Street, From the Beach series, for example, where you collected all kinds of colorful fragments of multimedia objects. Some of them had texts had on them, some of them were simply color and pattern, and then you put them together in the same way. I mean, there was a resonance there between what you do in your letters and what you do in those pieces.

I’m wondering too if there’s a connection – I’m thinking, for example, of the umbrella that you did and the very highly filigreed pieces that you made that were really art songs, if you will, of the craftsman, or keeping with silver or working with metal, these very detailed – Byzantine is the word you used earlier – the Byzantine patterns, and I’m thinking, you know, there again you’re taking the form of an umbrella handle and you’re breaking it down with the filigree, creating the part-whole relationships there. Does that make sense to you as a connection as well, in the context of assemblage work?

MR. EBENDORF: It fits perfectly into what I just previously said about patterning and putting – on that particular piece you’re speaking about is the umbrella handle made in Fredrikstad, Norway in the workshop in – probably in the ‘70s – yes, ‘70s, a major, major piece, and it’s one that is over the top of expertise of craftsmanship and reverence to the history of making – both the silversmith and goldsmith. But as you speak about – as you come down the handle there’s a row of filigree wirework, a row of filigree wirework, filigree wirework, and then all of a sudden I shift that visual vocabulary and then it becomes circles of silver, circles – another row, another row, and then I shift again and go back to the filigree work, and I shift again, another row of silver round pieces.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Gee, you’re reading it, aren’t you?

MR. EBENDORF: And it’s a wonderful display of that sense of language, but it’s also too, if you – I feel that’s a very formal – because of its precision and – it’s tight. I mean, it is tight and it is so beautifully done, and then if I take and swing to some of the – let’s say the cross reference exhibition and all the different pectoral crosses that are from broken shards of ceramics or broken shards of Amari plates and Absolut glass bottles, et cetera. In a way – I guess in a way it’s the same thing, but they’re – because they shards of glass and pieces of china are all broken and there’s no control sense of the shape so they’re all different. But again I’m laying them – I’m laying there the same way when I’m writing a word or making the marks on paper.

So sometimes people will say, is there – do you see a thread in your work, Bob? And I guess that oftentimes I don’t sit and think about that question, but sitting here today and thinking about that thread, does the work – if I look at the pieces from the ‘60s and now to this body of work and to my timeframe now, there is a thread. There definitely is a story; there is definitely a vocabulary and an attitude and an odor that these – that your work – that my work does, you know, bounce from one to the next to the next. But I guess when you’re in the process of making certain collections of work, you don’t feel that thread, or I don’t see that, until you sit down in a quiet moment of space and reflect on that.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: I was thinking too as you were speaking that you certainly are not the only artist who struggles with dyslexia, and so many people speak of just feelings of frustration, of shame, growing up with these, with this difficulty, and sometimes it’s hard for them to let go of those negative experiences that they had, shaming experiences they had with parents or teachers, and to say, “Well, wait a minute; this is actually wired into my mind and it’s an integral part of my artwork, the productive part that I do. It informs how I process the world, it informs the way I put shapes together, it informs the sorts of challenges that I set myself as an artist, the kinds of technical things I want to take on because I want to overcome them.” So there is a golden side and there is an oxidized side, a bright side and a dark side to it as well. I just wanted your reflections on –

MR. EBENDORF: You know, that’s – you’re overview, I’ve never really kind of put in that perspective, but it is – I can see how clear that maybe that was a gift – the way I function has been a very strong coin that I’ve played, and very unknowingly, but I’m going to step back a little bit further to that University of Kansas time when I was not – I was not that aware of how I could review this challenge and see it as an intricate part of the way I behaved and the way I function.

I’m going to take you to an experience that is very monumental to me, and that’s at the University of Kansas I came out of the studio; I was getting – it was the last year of graduate school, it was in the fall. I came out of the studio at two o’clock in the morning; I was silk-screening fabric. I stepped out in the hall and there was a sign in the hallway in yellow and black letters, and it said, Study Abroad: Fulbright applications due such and such. And then it had Greece, Germany, Japan, and it said room such and such. And I remember standing there looking at that, knowing that school was going to be coming to an end and not knowing too sure what was in front of me, but I remember standing there and looking and saying, oh, you know, god, wouldn’t that be great to study abroad? Oh, man. And then all of a sudden I said, oh, but what are you talking about? Your grades are so poor. This is for scholars. There’s no way, Jose. But I remember standing there looking at that and then how I all of a sudden I got this cold ice emotional twist and said, you know, but your grades would never – you’d never make it because of your grades, your academics.

So anyway, off I went, and about a week or so later, walking across campus I found myself – instead of headed for the art building I found myself in the library coming to this room. I said, “Excuse me; is this the Fulbright office?” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, let me ask you a question” – the lady behind the counter. I said, “Do you have to speak a language?” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, to apply for a Fulbright do you have to speak a” – because I didn’t have – I mean, I could hardly do English let alone speak a foreign language. She said, “Oh, no, you don’t have to speak a foreign language. Like there’s the U.K and there’s Australia and” – and she went on and on. And she said, “No, it’s not,” – she said. I said, “Well, may I have a form? May I” – she said, “Yes.” So she laid it up on the counter and I said, “No, give me three of them.” She said, “Why do you want three?” I said, “Well, I might make a mistake if I try to fill one out.”

So I took it and – took them and I went into the library and set down and started reading through them quickly. But anyway, I'm headed – there’s an end to this but it’s very – it points something very interesting to me, I’ve reflected on it over the years, and often I share this with a student. I remembered from art history that there was a lot of things going on in Scandinavia that dealt with the hand and dealt with the craft – I mean, bowls and textiles, and the furniture. And this was also at the time when the Danish modern was hitting America and we were hearing about it and we would – all the catalogues in New York – you know, the lamps and the textiles, the teak furniture and the Amari plates – I mean, not Amari but the Kari Frank and the ceramics, and there was Marimekko fabric.

So I went – pulled all of a sudden Scandinavia, and da da da. All of a sudden I came across Norway and it talked about the history of enameling and silversmithing. For some reason, Georg Jensen didn’t – a red light didn’t go on there, but Norway and enamels – so anyway, I started reading about Norway. I thought, well, I’ll just apply for Norway. I mean, why not? So I was doing this. I happened to be having an art history class with a woman who had been in Scandinavia on a Fulbright, and so I went to her and told her, and she said, “Bob, bring your paper; let me see your statement of purpose.” So I showed it to her, and – Marilyn Stokstad, Dr. Stokstad – and she looked at me, and she was the art historian teacher that I was taking and we’d finished the exam – because I was taking a class with her, and she said, “Well” – to our class; they were all graduate students – “Well, Bob, I don’t know who you copied off of but you made a C this time. Good for you.” Everybody would laugh and I’d get my paper back because I always was in trouble with her about getting –

But she liked me, but when she read the piece of paper she said, “Bob, you’re saying nothing; you need to be able to say what color shoelaces, what room you’re going to be in, who you’re going to study with.” And she said, “Well, I have a few contacts, and I don’t know if you have time or not but I will give you a letter to put in with your letter and you should send this document to these three people and ask them to respond back to you, and you might get something back in time. And if you do, you should include that in your proposal and then bring your new proposal back to me.” And things got back in time, and they came back from the museum on their letterhead. They came back from the academy with the letterhead; even told me what room I would study in and who I’d be with.

So long story short, so I’m standing there, I get a letter, and I’ve gotten a Fulbright and I’m overwhelmed. That night, standing on the stage, getting this piece of paper, being acknowledged in front of everybody, here was the person who was going off to study medicine; here was a person going off to study in law; here was a person going off – Fulbrights in archeology, et cetera. And I was the only person going off on a Fulbright to study art. I remember receiving that piece of paper and getting very emotional, and tears coming down, all of a sudden realizing that I look at that poster and I was not worthy – I said to myself, you could never do that because of your marks. And without taking that risk – but it was that sense of that – all of a sudden that evening I realized that you do have – you can chart some of your destiny, you can chart some of your – you can be the pilot, you can take challenges. You’ll fall off the table and get nosed and bump your knees, but what you need to do is take those risks and then just get up and brush off and go to the next challenge.

So the Fulbright – that evening changed my life in many, many ways, because what happened then of course with the Fulbright, that parlayed me into the Tiffany Grant and that parlayed me into – you know, and so it put a notch in my gun, it put a cornerstone in the building with good mortar around it, but emotionally it made a big impact that evening, realizing that I had looked at that and said, no way, Jose; I’ve got all these bad marks. And so we never should – and I share that with a student because oftentimes they don’t think that they’re capable of that challenge.

So that Fulbright did – it made a lot of difference. It opened a lot of doors, and many of those Norwegian contacts I have today that I still celebrate and am fortunate to have were ones that I made at that Fulbright time. And they’re major players now in the arena in Norway and in the Scandinavian countries. So it speaks of that taking the challenge and saying, well, what can I do except get a no, so let me just go ahead and go for it. I’ve got a lot of no’s. I’ve got a lot of grant proposals with no – I’ve got a lot of challenges with potential commissions and got a no, but you just kind of gussie up and take those documents and put them in the files and go back to the workbench.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Your story resonates with me because when I interview artists, when I do workshops for students to help them write artist statements, for example, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to people – not necessarily artists who suffer from dyslexia or struggle with dyslexia but artists who just say, quite as if it’s very obvious, “I'm not a word person, I’m not a scholar. I don’t deal with language; I deal with images.” And that belief or misbelief about yourself is very crippling because this culture is so – privilege is the word. I mean, if you can speak you’ve got power. If you can write you have power. This is something that’s drilled into us in school, and so if you find yourself as an artist, a person who works in the language of images, you’ve been taught also from a young age that somehow you work with a currency that isn’t worth quite as much and that you’re not going to be rewarded.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all, given your history, particularly your additional struggles with language, that you looked at that Fulbright poster and had those feelings about not being worthy. And I’m glad that you told that story because when you said – when you told about going to the Fulbright office you said, “I found myself going there,” as if somebody else was pushing you, as if you were in a trance or something, and I was wondering what that was about. It was obviously a very emotional decision for you to decide to get yourself on your feet and go there and confront this self-doubt that you had, this sense of unworthiness.

MR. EBENDORF: Yeah, and it did – there was a lot that came out of that that today I continue to say thank you for in that sense.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Well, a very rich experience personally, but also the success that you had enabled you to continue, I think, the generosity to keep giving back to people around you. You talk about how you tell this story to your students. It really impresses me, I have to say, when you’re talking about your experiences, how you run into such generous people; the people who have been willing to take the time to help you with the papers, the people – Carlyle Smith extending the welcoming hand to a high school student who’s come to visit a program; Robert Montgomery, who has an open-door policy so that you can be helped out; Fabian Wolf, your high school teacher – all these people who have been so generous with their time to help you move on your way, and I think that’s – those are bright lights along your path that I think – I see you being that bright light for other people, being generous to other people. You had that modeled so strongly for you in your own history.

MR. EBENDORF: You know, when you speak about that gift or that sense of nurturing and sharing, or opening doors – you know, I can go countless of my artist friends but also too the curatorial world has been – thinking about learning something and opening a door and laying things before me to experience, and I found that the museums have been very much there for me in a very interesting way, all the way from not knowing that you could go and make an appointment and ask for item this, this, this and this, and give the numbers, and you can find yourself in a room with a pair of white gloves and with a magnifying glass and drawing paper and observe and study something. At the same time, here’s the curatorial person, the museum director or the person the head of that department, captain or leader, sitting across the table from you, asking you questions about, “Well, how do you think this was done, or what do you think about these lines? Isn’t that – look how the design is laid out,” and so forth.

And so there has been this incredible window that was opened up for me in that sense. I never will forget going – reading something that Hovine had written about the Metropolitan Museum [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York] about – during his reign of leadership, where he’s talking about wanting the Metropolitan Museum to be more available to the public: how can we get the public to be more engaging with our holdings, and this is a house to welcome you to, and education is important and how can we reach out to the public?

I remember reading this article, and I had just arrived in New Paltz, New York at a new academic position with Kurt Matzdorf, to develop the metal program at SUNY New Paltz. And at that time I was president of SNAG [Society of North American Goldsmiths] – and that was 1970, and I went down and – connecting the dots – on the Fulbright boat – ship going over to Norway to start the Fulbright there was another Fulbright scholar, and he was going to study at the Folk Museum [The Norwegian Folk Museum, Oslo], and so Bret Waller – Mr. Waller is his name, and he is just now retired as the head of the museum at Indianapolis – Indianapolis, Indiana Museum of Modern Art [Indianapolis Museum of Art]. He had also helped build another major museum in Albany, New York, the new building that they had – he helped fund raise for.

But anyway, he was now back in America after the Fulbright. We had spent time together as young Fulbrighters in Oslo, Norway. He went back home. Now he found his job at Albany, at the museum, and then he had gone down to New York as head of the education department [at the Metropolitan Museum of Art]. So I go into him and make an appointment, and I said, you know, “Bret.” “What are you doing here Bob?” he said. “I have an idea,” I said, “I would like to talk to you because you’re the education – the head of the education – I would like to have a conference of metalsmiths to come to the Metropolitan Museum for maybe, say, three days, and to have hands-on viewing of objects. I mean, you’ve got these wonderful holdings in here, and because of the Society of North American Goldsmiths, the conference will take place in New York, in New York City, and since – and I’ll coordinate this.” And he said, “But I don’t” – I said, “Well, you know, I read this, hoping” – and I put the document in front of him and I said, you know, “He wants the museum being more to the public.” And I said, “Is there any way that you can make an appointment with him for me to propose this project?” He said, “Okay.” But he says, “First we have to get the approval of all the different curatorial people that if this were to fly, that they would welcome you for two hours in their department, let’s say the medieval department or the arms and armor.”

So that took a long time because all of a sudden I called to say, well, “Can we make an appointment, Mr. Nichols, the head of the arms” – oops, bad month. He’s having, you know, work. So we learned a lot about the museum world. Sometimes they’re on good behavior and sometimes they’re not, with one another. So finally we got all the approval of the people that – in the different departments if we would do this. So I went to holding and had a meeting with them, da da da da. And I said, “You want the museum to be a welcoming space, and here’s the way that I would like to be able to interface with you.” We got the green light.

So that experience – and here there was like 200 people or 300 people came from New York, and we had three days of sitting down with the curatorial and different departments with the sponge laid out, white gloves, with our books, discussing and talking technique, talking about culture, talking about the object, contextualizing what we were looking at, this object. And it was a monumental experience for us, and that’s what I talk about in the sense about a gift.

[Audio break.]

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: This is Tacey Ann Rosolowski interviewing Robert Ebendorf at his home in Greenville, North Carolina. It is April 16th, 2004, and I’m conducting this interview for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. This is disk number two.

Bob, we were talking about this amazing experience that you created at the Met with craftspeople coming in and actually looking at objects, and I just wanted to give you the opportunity to have some additional reflections about that experience.

MR. EBENDORF: The richness that’s created was the first time that the – many of the museum directors of different departments had sat down side by side or across the table with an object in front of them that they knew so well. They knew it from a historical point and reference. They had written about it for their catalogue, as you see the word like niello and repoussé, or using language that the metal smith knows. And on the other side of the table, here we were who were makers. And the dance that began to take place, the stripping off of credentials, where all of a sudden the museum curators said, “But, you know, neillo – now what is niello? What is it – how do you – what” – and we’d laugh and say, “Yes, you know the word but do you know how it’s made, or do you know how we apply it to the surface.”

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Could you stop for a second and tell us who was there? Who was around this table?

MR. EBENDORF: Well, it would be, for example, if we were the arms and armor – I don’t remember the curatorial people’s names, the directors at that time. That was back in – I don’t quite have that. But when we would go from one body of work, Roman pieces, it would be the person who was the head of the Roman –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Okay.

MR. EBENDORF: So it was that. But what was happening was that there was this exchange of comfort zone of all of the sudden the scholar, not feeling uncomfortable, said, “Yeah, I use that word but I don’t know what that means, or I don’t understand – what is repoussé? What is – I mean, I know that it makes the metal go up and down, but how do you make the metal go” – so there was this wonderful dance that was going on in the moonlight in the sense of not knowing the answer, but can you tell me the answer? Which, I was told, was quite unusual, because usually – you know, I’m a scholar and I don’t want to be uncomfortable that I don’t know – yeah, I’m using these words. And here we had the richness – we, the makers, had the richness of handling this bowl and looking at it and saying, “Oh, my goodness, can you see – I never thought it could be put together this way.”

So it was kind of like a clinic but it was a clinic of comfort zone that we really enjoyed, and it was the first time that many of the Society of North American Goldsmith’s students, young people as well as teachers, were able to pick up a 16th century bowl or to have this object in their hands, and to explore closely and to – with their magnifying glass or to do a drawing, or – [gasp] – “Look here what I found! Yes, it was done this way, I think.” And so it was a very – and that’s exactly what Hovine wanted to have happen was to embrace the going public, to embrace both the scholarly as well as the maker, as well as John Doe walking in off the street.

So that conference for the three days also opened the door for other conferences of this kind because I could parlay that – I was president at that time – I could parlay that blue chip to the next museum and say, well, if the Met did it, I think your Virginia Fine Arts Museum [Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond], your wonderful Art Nouveau collection, and the wonderful pieces in your collection that are from the Fabergé collection, we would like to be able to see, or the Greek gold jewelry.

So it was the turning point for the Society of North American Goldsmiths to once again to fold scholarly pursuit in with theory, in with the exhibitions, in with the exchange of ideas. So the museums have been a very special springboard and gift to me, and I celebrate their gift, and I’ve had – you know, it’s enriching, because art history was not – was something that was not academically – grade-wise was not one that showed very strongly, and it was a struggle, but through the Norwegian experience and having the museums that we had to sit and do the drawings of the pieces in front of us and so forth, the museum became alive to me and became human beings and culture. And all of a sudden it tweaked me – it tweaked me to want to go pick up the journal and read a bit more about that particular culture or that particular village or that particular archeological dig, et cetera, where I didn’t connect that when I was sitting in the classroom listening to slides in the dark and making poor marks on the exams trying to reassemble the thoughts from the lectures. So –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: I'm sorry to interrupt you. I was just thinking that we’re talking about art history, where you’re shown a sequence of slides or you’re looking at books, and they’re flat. And you’re talking about relating to three-dimensional objects and the joy of discovering three-dimensionality.

MR. EBENDORF: That’s exciting to hear you say that because that’s why, when we have that dimensional and that tactile and that odor and that sensibility of taking the object, the ceramic bowl or the woven piece of fabric and to not only pleasure the eye visually of its color or of what – of its image, but to handle the piece and to feel the knots, or to feel the glaze or the roughness of that surface, and to have the dimensionality or to be able to walk visually and physically with my hand around the object, how that, again, illuminates the history; it illuminates the culture. It brings me to wanting to go to Africa or brings me to want to know more about this particular period of time.

So, yes, when I’m looking at a slide – and we grow up primarily in our educational context of a piece of paper with copy on it that takes you to another part of the world or takes you to a philosopher’s thought, but the richness of sitting across the table and having a cup of tea or red wine with the scholar and to catch his or her nuances and body language, how that enriches the journey.

Yesterday I overheard you talking to the student as you were walking through about the object and the three-dimensional presence versus the flat screen, of the slide on the screen or the computer screen, and the sensibility of the texture, the odor and the hand on the object. And it does become – and my world is about my hands and my eyes. They are my tools. I mean, I just happened to pick up a hammer versus the pencil, but it’s the hand, the eyes that help me navigate, or help me bring my thoughts into dimensionality or into a dimension.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Also I think hands and eyes are not only tools but they’re also organs of intelligence. I mean, people who handle things, they have – it may not be something that we’re used to talking about easily in Western culture because we think about the brain as being the seat of intelligence, but that’s a really limited way of understanding how you bring – how you bring some kind of organizing force to the world. Something that creates – you take something random out there and you make it organized, you create it, you make it into something aesthetic, you make it into something beautiful. And artists use their eyes and they reprocess materials to how they touch them, what they know about the textures, what they understand about the structure of a three-dimensional object, and then they reorganize those materials and give them back to us. So there is a lot of intelligence in the hands, I think.

I’m just making a connection here, and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, but you always talk about how you were so athletic when you were a kid and then in high school, and I think, you know, there’s the body intelligence in athletics as well. You know, how do you pitch? How do you get that ball to sail across just the right arc and hit its mark?

MR. EBENDORF: When you talk about body intelligence, particularly – I have to think about that sweaty body when I was wrestling, and the sense of – because it’s one on one, and you’re engaged in physical contact, or combat, but a lot of that is about balance and feeling where the other person is, on the right side, the left side, the balance of that, and your quick move to move around and grab the ankle and to upset the person. But it’s just that physical contact and that sense of that being able to touch.

And I think about that sense of hand and materials, and because my world is very much about what I pick up, and as I'm walking down the street or walking in the woods and I pick something up, I’m not only seeing it but I’m actually sometimes putting it to my nose and smelling it, or breaking off a part of it and seeing what the texture is – you know, how strong is the material?

So, assembling that emotion and that sense of sensibility is far – a world apart from reading copy on a piece of paper. And you used the word intelligence, and I think that, particularly here in the West, we think of intelligence by disseminating what we read and what we gather by eye and by what we read and retain and spew back out or bring back out verbally.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And also in math.

MR. EBENDORF: But my world is very much – not opposite, but my world is very much about my hand and the object – the dimension – the fiber of the object, and then I recreate that – or bring that language together in an object.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: I love the way you describe the wrestling experience, and I’m making a connection with a phrase that you used with me in another interview in another context, and you talked about how when you were working metal – you called it “making love to the metal,” and that’s not a combat situation but it’s still this intense interaction. I’m wondering if you see connections between working of metal and the wrestling for example.

MR. EBENDORF: Yeah. I mean, to – [End tape one.] – to – for example, I’ll go to the metal arena that when I’m riveting something and drilling holes and finding the right wire to go into that – or particularly in soldering where I’ve set up the assemblage of the piece and to solder you need heat and you need to have the metal clean and so you’re working with all these parts to assemble them and get them in the right position. Then you bring the flux to it and then you put your solder where you want to place it and in comes the heat and you’re bringing up the temperature, and you know that the solder’s going to melt at a certain temperature but you don’t have a thermometer there.

You don’t have a thermometer telling you that now it’s getting hotter and hotter but it’s visually and you’re watching and you’re kind of pumping, you’re kind of watching that. And then as the – as your getting to these – and your eyes are telling you through the color – the way the metal’s changing color-wise and what the flux is doing, the flux is watery. It’s just – it’s just there and then all of a sudden the water is burned out or evaporated out and it starts getting the chalky white. And then the chalky white then turns to this glassy transparent. And again, you’re knowing the thermometer’s going up and you’re sitting there watching and hoping that you’ve judged everything properly.

And then as it reachs that temperature where – when the solder – where the solder is going to now melt and make the union between the joints that you’re trying – and it’s like this sexual, this wonderful flow of this white line moving around through the traveling – where you wanted to go, you’ve – I’ve nailed it. Everything was done exactly like I wanted. And to watch that white line, the solder line, move through the – through the journey, it is like “Wow, look at” – and all of a sudden your body language goes back down and things are now cooling off.

And so there is this sensibility in taking it to the wrestling match where you’ve got this body contact and the sweat and you’re slimy and whatever, and then all of a sudden you slip out from underneath his armpit because you’ve been quick and you’ve caught him off balance and you’ve made that escape. And you’ve – you gain a point because you’ve escaped or done the – made the right move.

So the combinations are real in the sense that there is a – there’s a moving towards that event and judging and trying to put the right combination together and then making the right move. And, for example, on my bench if I’m working I – all of a sudden I’ve thought I’d prepared and making the right move and the thing burns up and the wire melts and there’s a hole in the piece of metal, I look, I go didn’t – didn’t call it right. I made the wrong – I made the wrong decision.

But it’s all about I made that decision and, you know, the workbench – I’ve often wondered if I’m – it’s all – you know, that workbench is like a small world and I have total control of that and it’s my call. And if I make the wrong decision I might burn the piece or doesn’t fit, and it’s not about, you know, dealing with a committee and negotiating the right price or negotiating the right kind of deal, having my hidden agendas and if I’m going to be able to make that happen. But when I’m – it’s just pretty honest. It’s between me and my decision making with these materials.

And I’ve often wondered if – how that plays in, if I’m a person who wants that kind of control and this is one way I get this control is in my little world, in this capsule doing my creative dance. I don’t think I’ve found an answer but I’ve oftentimes brought that up to myself as a question about is it about control and is that because you don’t – you can put your family, you can put everything else out there during the day – responsibilities – on hold and you’re here with your – with your dance. You’re here making love to what you enjoy doing and for that moment in time or for that day or for that ongoing project I’m bliss. I’m in this – I’m in this world of my own and challenged both creatively and technically.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Why do you ask yourself that question about whether – why are you bothered by the issue of whether it’s about control or not?

MR. EBENDORF: I think that – I think this could go back to an – it’s going to bounce back to an educational experience. It was a – there was a certain period of time as a teacher – and this was in the mid 70s – where I began to wonder and I also – I was going to therapy, I also began to – I began to ask myself am I a teacher – is this about control? Am I such a sick puppy that I need to have this – I can walk into this room and say, “Blue,” and everybody will work with blue, and I’ll say, “Now go left,” and everybody will go left because I’m asking them to do this.

Is that about – so I was asking myself am I – you know, is this a world that – you know, am I afraid to be outside here and to take on all these other – all these other things? Because you look at teaching and it – it’s interesting the psychological game or the psychological behavior that goes on there. I mean, you are a very controlling factor and this group of people is looking for your leadership. So I can give them whatever recipe and ask them to follow it. Like Pavlov’s dogs they’re going to travel – follow that maze and then end up at the end where – where the – where the document will tell them to.

And I began to ask myself the question – and I think maybe that’s where I began to change my teaching habits to a sense where it wasn’t so much about a formula and it wasn’t so much about giving a hand out to the – or a hand out where I wanted them to go. I would give them enough of the recipe but not all the recipe and they’d say, “But I – what do you really want?” I’d say, “What I want you to do is I want you to find your way and make a decision and be responsible for it when we would discuss it. But don’t” – “Do you want – do you want us to make the ring hollow or do you want us to” – I said, “Make it solid if you want, just be responsible.”

But the craftsmanship, do it well and if – and you know, if you’re going to go over the edge and do a sloppy job, dammit! Do a really sloppy job. Don’t mess with my head. But let’s talk about responsibilities and let’s talk about – because I want you to find your language.

So I think that when that educational thing – and if that goes back to this about control, but I’ve often – and why do I ask myself about that today in working at my bench? Because I’m in – I’m probably the happiest in my world when I’m in my workshop working and it’s because I’m very isolated and I work very much alone. I have long periods of time alone and it’s a sanctuary. It’s like my temple and I can, you know, put music on, I can light candles and have incense and I’m surrounded by the things that I love and that – that nurtures my creative dance or creative journey.

And so I – anyway, I look at the workbench because sometimes when you’re at the – for a jeweler, that becomes a pretty small world and, you know, my parameter looking out five yards to the left or right, I need to be right there or else I’ll lose where I’m headed.

So – but I think when I’m talking about control I think back of that earlier time in the ‘70s when I began – I was in therapy beginning to ask questions like that about – you know, about what the world I was participating in and about education, about teaching. And maybe it was a time that, you know – then those questions come about to some people, maybe they don’t. And I’m sure there were other things going on too. I mean, therapy is something that has been rich for me to experience. It was uncomfortable at times and I was also kind of quiet under the radar but now looking back and realizing that a lot of – a lot of growth came from those – from those times and those hours.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What made you decide to go into therapy?

MR. EBENDORF: Probably relationship struggles in the sense of being better understood and sharing time with people, with a wife and with – and also the educational questions. And taking – taking to – taking on certain responsibilities maybe that I had cared to – not to address and maybe not having the strength to pull that together myself, and I was told by others that this was maybe one way to face those demons or to be a part of that and to scrape away layers – why you behave the way you behave.

So, you know, I – and it – and it does reveal – it does bring you to some very interesting realizations about yourself and looking in the mirror and be able to look in the mirror and look at yourself and be comfortable with what you see, and also realizing that, you know, when that – when that demon raises his head you’re aware of it or when that challenge is there and you’re aware of it. If you go to the left you really find yourself unhappy and off-center. If you realize the temptation or the challenge to be better equipped to make the right decision. And I’ve made a lot of wrong decisions but, you know, it’s because I didn’t make the right turn, I took the left turn instead and then have to work my way back out of that.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So this period of time when you’re reevaluating your life and your relationship with responsibilities and making these decisions about changing your classroom strategies with your students – and I thought it was interesting that you were asking them to examine their own responsibilities vis à vis their work at that time as well. I’m wondering did you think back at all to your own experience – we haven’t used the word mentors but have – did you think back at all to those educational figures that you had in your own past who modeled for you how you behave in the classroom?

I’m just – I’m just wondering – for you to think about because we talked about Fabian Wolf – I don’t know if you’d count her as a mentor – and then Robert Montgomery and Carlyle Smith. I mean, who would you label as your mentors. And now, with the distance of time, did they do a good job and are – did you aspire to be the kind of mentor that they were for you, or you have a different stamp that you put on that role?

MR. EBENDORF: I think there’s a lot of categories in that question, but let me – let me –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: [Laughs.] Sorry!

MR. EBENDORF: – let me – let me buttonhole a couple things –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: The poor interviewee unpacks the question! [Laughs.]

MR. EBENDORF: Let me buttonhole a couple of them that I can – can put in context. Let me go to Carlyle. You’re right that I haven’t mentioned much about the word mentors and exactly pinning that down, but Carlyle Smith, who was the head of the metal program and the person who I had a lot of contact with. And I – and oftentimes when I talk with other former friends that also had time with Carlyle we used to laugh about how on a certain day during the week it would be our turn to go get donuts and coffee and go to his office, and of course we treated. He didn’t buy. We treated so we knew we had to have money in our pocket the day that we – we’d get our number called.

But we’d go get coffee and come back and sit and just sit in his office and talk about the work we were doing, but he never – he never pushed us one way or the other. He never – it was more of a fireside chat. It was more of a – we didn’t talk about life. We just – we ate donuts, drank our coffee, had the work on the table. He didn’t – it was just this kind of conversation but it was not about the design of things, that I remember anyway. It wasn’t – it was just that we knew sometime during the week we would go there and do that.

But what he was able to do, he created an environment for us to do our work and to bring as many experiences to our educational enlightenment as he could. At that time we didn’t have guest – a lot of guest artists to come in to do a workshop. He didn’t think worldly about much more. He thought – as far as we – that I knew about was Kansas City, Missouri or Kansas City, Kansas and maybe the “Wichita National” because we all applied to that. But we didn’t get catalogs, we didn’t – it wasn’t that flow of information. We had a metal guild that we would come together and do things, but it was a pretty low-key studio. But he had good staff working with him, other teachers that, you know, worked with the program.

Now, in that program was Robert Montgomery – also taught a metal class, but I’m going to shift now to another, I would say, mentor like Carlyle Smith. Now, you know what’s interesting? Carlyle Smith is what? Probably 91 or so today, and he and I still talk on the phone. And he’s getting ready to have an exhibition of his work – it might be the last one because he is getting frailer and frailer at – in Topeka, Kansas at the Mulvane on Washburn campus [Mulvane Art Museum of Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas]. But we still stay in touch and – by phone, not by letter anymore but by phone.

Robert Montgomery, who’s passed away. When I think about mentors I think about the richness that he gave to his class and I was one who sucked that up. He would start his morning design classes by reading from Time magazine. He would read an article – he would start – he would choose an article and he would read it. He said, “You as people who are in the creative field, who think you’re or whatever, you should know what’s going on around the world around you so that you can contextualize – you can bring this into things that you’re doing.” And he would read an article about some place in another world. He would read the section about art. He’d pick out an article, he’d read it.

But I can remember him opening the class by reading out of Time magazine and before we actually started on the design project of the week or whatever the assignment was. And what he shared – what he brought forth was the importance of the bigger – the bigger picture, and he was good at criticism. He was good at looking at the metalwork or looking at the design work and talking about proportions and so forth. So he was more hard-nosed in a sense of getting us to talk about criticism and about the work we were doing.

But I look at him as – again, he was the person who said, “Bring me themes and let me talk to you about them.” He also opened his house on Sunday afternoons. We knew if we wanted to go for dinner we could all come and put money in the pot and someone would go out and get the pasta and the hamburger and so forth and we would all cook together. And who came there – who came there were the hardcore shakers that were the graduate students that were in graphic design and textiles and ceramics. They were the hardcore young men and women that are – today are still very active in the field.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Who were some of those people that you remember?

MR. EBENDORF: There was a Russ and Dorothy Deanna who – who were both graphic designers. There was also a gentleman who – industrial design – but they – they were people that went on and made a mark in the field. Some were educators and some were in the field of publications and design field. But it was a place – it was a haven where we could come and there was jazz music and there was food –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It has a real family to it –

MR. EBENDORF: It did.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: – that really jumps out.

MR. EBENDORF: And it was not Bohemian but it was where we could come and just be who we wanted to be.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Did Robert Montgomery – did you feel he pushed you in any particular direction in terms of design vocabulary or did he pretty much give you free reign?

MR. EBENDORF: Open.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Yeah.

MR. EBENDORF: Free reign. But seemed to be very broad in his sensibilities of if you were working in graphic design or working in textiles or ceramics – so he seemed worldly. He seemed like a person that had – he was a Korean veteran coming back and he had been damaged in the war. He had some – he was going to VA hospitals every other week for therapy, and –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: When you say damaged what do you mean?

MR. EBENDORF: He had been facially damaged by shrapnel and also in his back. So he had a lot of physical pains that, you know, you wouldn’t know. He was – his face was scarred rather severely and – but, you know, once you got to know him and so forth that – that didn’t make sense. I mean, you didn’t notice that, but I remember his tear ducts – he would – his tears would – he would constantly have tear ducts where they would be watering. But he would go to the – over to the VA hospital for physical therapy work and he was on disability type of thing, but he – but he seemed to bring – he seemed to bring the outside world – the art world, the social concerns into the classroom where some of the other teachers were just hardcore about what they were good at and what they were teaching.

And so – and Desa Bush, the lady who I experienced as a freshman in the nature museum drawing class. I mean, she was this long-legged drink of water with this white hair all piled up on her head, and said – you know, and walked around like a crane and around the tables looking at each – as we were working. And she would sit up in front because usually it seemed like we were there at lunchtime or 10ish – at 10:00 in the morning we’d hear the rustle of these little sacks. We’d look up and she’d be eating away raisins and then the pecans and, you know – and then she would eat the oranges. So she was just this health nut probably that was – but what a wonderful – she was very [inaudible].

So there’s – there are three people who are extremely memorable to me in my educational journey and that – and my – and my thesis advisor was Margie Whitney who – Margie was – Margie Whitney was the head of the design department and she was the person who I sat with and would go over the thesis material that I was preparing from that sense.

So the educational thing the – thinking back at the KU time, it didn’t seem to be as – it didn’t seem to be as formalized as I see the art department that I’m in now – you know, people who have hand outs for every class. And there was syllabuses, I’m sure, at that time but it didn’t seem as driven. Here – you know, nowadays in many of the universities you have all these syllabus, you have to turn them in every year to be approved and looked at and also – even so much where some departments have you actually – let me see the syllabus for the whole – you know, every project you give to kind of be sure that everybody’s on the same chart and so forth.

And so it’s – I think it’s a little bit – and that has a lot to do with the computer world too, I think, and in the sense –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And also departments justifying their existence to other echelons in the university system.

MR. EBENDORF: The number count and –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Yeah, all of that.

MR. EBENDORF: – you know, if I can do it – a general art history class on art appreciation you can put 150 people in that lecture hall versus a weaving studio where you have 10 people to 12 people. And the administrative say, “You know, we like the numbers because that’s – that’s – the dollars come in on that end. So you’re running a class with 10 people? You know, I don’t quite get the connection here.”

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: But you were fortunate enough to have mentors who really left you to your own devices. I mean, they seemed to give you just what you needed and let you have free reign – to use the phrase we used earlier – to find your own way. Or maybe you even as a young person had the wisdom to select out people who would give you that freedom.

MR. EBENDORF: You know, and that goes back to the thing, the sadness of me being in graduate school at the same undergraduate school where I knew – I knew the support – I knew who I enjoyed working with or who I – who I excelled in and I knew the ones – the areas, the teachers that I didn’t do well with. And so I, of course, chose the ones that I – that embraced me and from that sense. And I really do feel that if I would have gone away to another university for graduate school I do think that I would have grown so much more, I think, because I am so avidly against here – I mean, many years later and the three different universities I’ve been it, I’ve – I’m the first one to throw a red light up in a person’s return to do graduate school –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Sure.

MR. EBENDORF: – at the same – at the same group. And sitting there and counseling the students – say “But I don’t have the money to go – you know, that’s why I want to stay here again.” I know – I said “But, you know, if you stay here you won’t learn and you won’t – you won’t be challenged because you know the game.”

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Well, it seems that at the end of your MFA experience you took the big leap and really got yourself out of the situation because that was when you went to the Fulbright.

MR. EBENDORF: Right.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So maybe we can talk a little bit about that experience.

MR. EBENDORF: The – the Fulbright definitely – someone says, “You know, what was different about the Fulbright years – educational experience than the University of Kansas that you celebrate so much and speak so – that they did such a good job?” Well, the Fulbright took me to an academy – to the Oslo School of Art and Design and those teachers were – some of the teachers were people who worked in industry for a factory, for a major firm and spent – to the government – the state would pay them to – a salary to come to the academy to teach two days a week.

For example, in this silversmithing class, the – in the workshop there was a man who was like the technician who came two days a week to be in the workshop. And I didn’t speak fluent Norwegian but with my hands and the grunting and groaning, the drawings and knowing the tools and the materials I did well, but I could have done so much better if I would have been able to have been fluent in the Norwegian.

However, in the workshop I was building a – making coffeepot and I was getting ready to do some soldering which was very, very complex for me. And the students say “Well, go to” – the man’s name was Malum – Malum, who was the technical wizard in the workshop. They said, “Malum’s the best solderer in all of Norway.” I went big deal, best solderer, you know – so it came time and I was trying to fit these – these hinges into the coffeepot and getting ready to the soldering and Malum came, looked over at my shoulder because he walked the workshop and he was assisting – he was a technical assistant.

And he saw me going over to start to do the soldering and he came up and he tapped on the back and in Norwegian – I couldn’t understand exactly except I knew that he wanted to show me something and so I gave him the torch. So he stood there and soldered these hinges into place and as he did this I stood there, and his hands and his knowledge of what was going on was like a surgeon doing open-heart surgery with one eye shut. And the solder and the – you know, it was like his fingers were right there with the red hot – moving things around where it wanted it, and when he got done and hung the torch up and walked away I said to myself yeah, he’s the best solderer in all of Norway.

And so at this school we had this opportunity to – I mean, that’s where I really felt I got honed and my edge got sharpened and I got put in my place about the craftsmanship because I was working with men and women who craftsmanship was the pride of their world and this is what they had passionately chosen to do, and they wanted to passionately show you or be there with you to nurture you and build you to bring that same pride. So the Fulbright brought me into sharpening the knife and realizing that if I didn’t do it right, go back and re-do it. If you burn something up, that’s okay, just re-fabricate that piece and do it again.

And so the Fulbright brought that into focus and the Fulbright also brought into focus where like we would go to the museum to the drawing room – they had a drawing room or a laboratory, a laboratory. We would go in, there were drawing tables with lights and our professor who wore a white coat, we were – and there are cases all around the room with glass and big block doors and we would be asked which object do you want? And you’d walk around like going shopping in a supermarket and you’d say, “Gee, I like that reliquary, that gold and silver with gemstones.” Or, “Gee, I like that chalice,” or maybe it was a knife and fork and spoon.

And I could say, “I want that one, number 704” and he would take his clipboard and write down my name and 704, take this big key and open this door, this cabinet door and swing it open, and reach in and give me this artifact, this object. And I would take it back to my table and I would live with that object for the next five – five weeks and – or the next – during that time. And what we would do – we would be charged responsibility of investigating the object that we chose and then to draw it on the piece of paper, draw it to – with precision.

Like, for example, when I finished with that drawing – or when we the student would finish that drawing, we could take that drawing to the factory and ask them to make this piece. And so when we would finish the drawings he would come up with his calipers and the object would still be sitting there, and he would take the calipers and do this, go to the side, look at the hinge, do this, look at the spoon, make the measurement. So he would make a mark or a grade or an approval on how exact we were able to pursue the investigation. And I had never had that gift or that surprise and to be able to be that close to, and that serious about, the investigation.

So, again, now where does that key into? It keys into Desa Bush and the nature of museum drawing class –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Yeah.

MR. EBENDORF: – where we were asked to draw that orange peel – look at that orange peel and draw that orange with graphite on that flat piece of paper so it looked like I was looking with a magnifying glass at an orange peel even though it was in graphite. So –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So when you – I’m sorry.

MR. EBENDORF: No.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: I was going to ask, so you were given this assignment you did consider it a gift. You didn’t kind of buck a little bit at having to do it with precision?

MR. EBENDORF: No, I never – and I think that’s why the museum – because it was in the museum and that’s why all of a sudden the museum began to take on this new persona of wisdom and history of my – of my men and women before me that had made this thing. But I also found out in this experience at the museum, and visiting the factories, et cetera, that all of a sudden many times these objects were made by teams.

They were not like – I came from an experience here in the U.S. at that time where, you know, the jeweler – that the university jeweler or the student – the jeweler would go to the studio and make the – do the drawing, show it to the client, come back and make the piece of jewelry, or draw the coffeepot and go to the studio and start raising and put the handle together out of wood and this and that. And we would make the piece totally by ourselves, but in the – in the European experience all of a sudden I realized that there was a person who was the raiser, there was a person who was the chaser, there was a person who did the engraving.

So in the Scandinavian workshops many time there was a, you know – there was a gift, there was a talent for – and I learned that more now when the Tiffany Grant came about when I was actually working in a small workshop and I can talk more about how that did become very departmentalized. I mean, all of us could solder, all of could hammer and so forth, but when it came time to make the spoons or when it came time to make the lockets or the boxes with hinges there was the guy who knew how to make the boxes, and there was the guy who knew how to make the spoons, or there was a lady who knew how to put the enameling – you know, make that all work.

So I’ve had that window opened up about the, you know – in the medieval workshops oftentimes there were the expertise people that were the young men who were the apprentice who – you know, who did the charcoal and got the forge ready and did the – did just only the hammering and then someone else would do the detailing.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What other differences were there between – did you see between the American system – either of education or of production – and the Scandinavian?

MR. EBENDORF: In the academy the school was connected to the museum and even though at the University of Kansas there was a museum but we never had the opportunity to, you know – but so at the European experience, particularly the Fulbright, it seemed like that they – there was a workshop, there was also technical people who came to be in the workshop so many days a week that were coming from industry. Our professors were also men and women who we could pick up certain catalogs and see pieces they had designed: candlestick holders, bowls, vegetable dishes, flatware that they – that were in production in the major silver houses in that town. The David Anderson Firm was one and another very well known was the Tostrip. David Anderson and the Tostrip company, these were the two – they were like the Cartier’s and the Tiffany’s of New York but they were the major silver and jewelry houses.

And many of our faculty, you know, had – were on retainers, drawing on paper pieces to be made in the factory or be made in – for the firm. They were no longer doing the work, but when the drawings were approved they would be bought and they would go to the workshop – the drawings would go to the workshop. And the silversmith that you don’t even know, he would start or she would start raising the vessel and then it would go from there to the repoussé and chaser to do the ornamentation on the surface.

So the Norwegian Fulbright began to open up the realization of the bigger picture of the – of the – of my history or the history that I was a part of.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Now, how did it – how did it work? Did you go there and then you were given specific – you worked in the workshop but then were you given specific assignments of pieces that you were supposed to produce yourself? How – what was – what was the goal of your time?

MR. EBENDORF: On the Fulbright?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Yeah, on the Fulbright.

MR. EBENDORF: The Fulbright did have structure. We spent the first half of the – of my experience of that year we spent at school but then also at the different museums. We went to the Folk Museum and looked at old Norwegian objects and we went there to draw and to – we would draw sitting in front of a case, trying to duplicate what the glass in front of us – the object we had chosen. Then in the afternoon we’d have what we called investigation where we would look for creative ideas, design, craft, and materials. So we could anywhere in the museum and draw with colored ink looking at something that gave us inspiration and we could stylize that how we wanted to.

In the workshop, we had assignments. We had assignments in the workshop – I mean, at school. Like I had the drawing class that to design flatware – I mean, knives and forks and spoons – too – we might have another assignment to design a coffeepot and teapot and a tray. This would be drawings and we would make also the drawings. We also would make in plasterline clay representations of some of the things – you know, like what the handle looked like or what the spout would look like in dimension.

And in the workshop – meaning where we actually were sawing, filing, and solder – we would – we did enameling pieces. We would design in the – on paper what we wanted to make and then we would go to the workshop, and the workshop – our professor might walk through but that’s where the technicians would come from the factories, the technician would be there. If I was in the enameling studio there would be an enameling technician there that – I’d have my drawings and I’d have to sit there and do my sawing but if I had enameling questions about, you know, what – what color goes – matures more than the other one she was or he was there to help me with that.

If I was making a bowl in the workshop and I had the drawing and I had purchased the silver and the stakes and the hammers, I’d be hammering away – kneeling, hammering away but the technician would be walking around and if I had a question – he’d say, “No, not that hammer. Use this hammer.” If I needed help to solder the bowl on I could go to Malum and say, “Malum, you know, I’m trying – how do I – how do I hold this down?”

So there was that – so that was the difference – it was just ratcheted up versus where at the University of Kansas it seemed more relaxed and not – there was a different attitude going on.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It seems like a really different social environment too because did – I mean, were there the after – after hours parties? I mean, what was the social life like?

MR. EBENDORF: The social life was definitely not with the faculty, the – or at least from my experience. The social – being a foreigner, being a Fulbright and some of the students – well, also too it was very departmentalized in the sense that I was there to be in the metal program and I was in the metal program every day. And I didn’t do ceramics, I didn’t – I didn’t really venture – I tried to venture in because I was curious but I – my umbrella, the world that I lived in was in the metal world. When I walked in that’s the rooms I went to and the courses that they had.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Where did you live?

MR. EBENDORF: I lived up the – very close to the Holmenkollen ski jump, about a half hour out of Oslo by the train. You would take from Nationaltheater [Nasjonaltheatret], from the center of town where all of the trains left – I took a trolley car up the mountain to – and on the Holmenkollen line and I lived in this wonderful cottage that hung on the side of the mountain, and my stop that I got off was the next to the last stop on the Holmenkollen line.

And the cottage overlooked or opened up into the valley, and so it was very – very beautiful, the living accommodations that – and I – and who owned the house – it was a bungalow. And it was owned by a family that the husband was a world-renowned geologist because, you know, Norway was a major, major geology world for so many scholars who were geologists to come to be there to study their world of geology because of the snow, and the mountains and so forth – and the oil and all. So geology – he was a geologist and world renowned and they had a guest house that was a rental that – I found my way to that.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: You lived there alone?

MR. EBENDORF: I was there married and had that wonderful year there.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And your wife’s name was?

MR. EBENDORF: Susanna. Susanna Springer from Sunburst, Montana.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And when were you – what year were you married?

MR. EBENDORF: Right after – at the end of graduate school, and Susanna and I went on the Queen Mary, matter of fact –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Oh, really?

MR. EBENDORF: – on the voyage with the Fulbrighters out of New York City to Oslo, Norway and spent the year in Oslo on the Fulbright time.

Something else happened there that I just want to make reference to because it was a very disjointed moment and frightening time and one of great emotions. During that year, it was the year that J.F.K., John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. And I can remember sitting in this little bungalow, both Susanna and I, listening to the wireless – to the radio on the shelf to the BBC getting in English – because we didn’t understand Norwegian – getting this report that this had happened, this tragedy had happened. And being totally saddened and also feeling totally disjoined because we were in a foreign place and all we wanted to be was – we wanted to be home, we wanted to be with our family. We wanted to be with our – with our nation, with our – we wanted to be home and we were not, and we were really in this world of – that we didn’t really – couldn’t communicate that well with.

That morning I had to – I went to school and I can remember going into the school, getting off the train – and, of course, on the train no one knew that I was American. But anyway going into the school and – that morning, and the janitor saw me walking and he came up to me and he gave me this litt