For the past twenty-five years Robert Ebendorf has been reemploying existing materials by devising ingenious uses for what has heretofore been discarded, discovering ways to make new materials from the used. Known for jewelry that includes everything and anything that he has found, he continues his on-going investigations into “Representations”. Ebendorf’s conceptual approach to jewelry–making, which questions the nature of adornment itself, explores alternative concepts and materials. The creativity of his jewelry lies not simply in the intellectual repositioning of familiar objects, but in more physical transformations of material, that, in the end, astonish the viewer. It is exactly this sense of astonishment that gives his pieces their value. It is the profound incongruity between what they are made from, and what they are now that so engages the imagination.
Born in 1938 in Topeka, Kansas, Bob received his BFA in 1960, his MFA in 1962. Following graduation, he received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the State School of Applied Arts and Crafts in Norway. He has taught at the University of Georgia (1967 – 1971) and State University of New York at New Paltz (1971 – 1988). In 1995, he was awarded the American Craft Council Fellowship for his achievement in the crafts and Commitment to the craft movement. Bob is co-founder and past president of the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) and represented in many worldwide collections including the Metropolitan Museum of New York, The Victoria and Albert Museum (England), the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Mint Museum of Craft Design in Charlotte, Le Musee des Arts Decoratifs de Montreal, National Museum of Wales, Schmuck Museum, Pforzheim, Germany to name a few. He currently serves as the Belk Distinguished Professor in the Art at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.
Robert Ebendorf, Cicada Beach, 2006. Mixed media. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Henry Stindt.
