Curiosity as Longevity: The Life of Bob Ebendorf

By Brian D’Ambrosio

As a young child, Santa Fe artist Robert “Bob” Ebendorf hauled a red wagon through the alleys of Topeka, scrounging stuff with satisfaction.

Even though Kansas was designated as a “dry state” in the early to mid 1940s, when Bob rifled through the dumpsters or opened the trash can lids, he found crates of empty alcohol bottles, and their aesthetic components exerted a weird sense of fascination.

Bob would stack the wagon with discarded decanters, flasks, and containers, especially fond of the more ornate ones, such as the heart-shaped amber glass bottles of Paul Masson sherry. In time, he’d show up at home with his pile of discoveries.

Bob’s father set aside a few shelves in the garage for the boy to exhibit such random findings, the bottles displayed alongside damaged plates, twisted scraps of rusty metal, phonograph chips, and broken mirrors.

“I had a great feeling of pride,” said Ebendorf. “It was like my own exhibition, my own little world, and my own little museum.”

These days, Ebendorf, 85, stands among the most admired talents in the contemporary metals and jewelry field, “a magician grounded in the understanding of earth and materials,” in the words of one former student, still possessing the same desire to discover, the same unabated inquisitiveness.

Co-founder and former president of the Society of North American Goldsmiths, his art is represented in diverse collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, in England, and Yale University Art Gallery. Among other platitudes, he taught at East Carolina University from 1998 to 2016, serving as the Belk Distinguished Professor in the Arts for many years.

Curiosity Feeds Curiosity

From childhood to adulthood to middle age and beyond, curiosity is what has brought Ebendorf to every new sphere, a self-perpetuating blessing continuously feeding its own ingenuity.

“Sadly, many of us lose that child-like sense of curiosity as we become more impacted with professional responsibility, obtaining success, or maintaining relationships,” said Ebendorf. “Our open turf of curiosity gets clouded by living in society.”

Over the years, the Smithsonian Institute acquired several pieces of Bob’s goldsmithing jewelry and eventually invited him to participate in its Archives of American Art Oral History Program, acquiring the copious archive of his personal correspondences with other American and European artists, as well as seven decades’ worth of drawings, some of them from as early as grade school and as recent as a few days prior to the moment that they were packed and taken away.  

“They would have probably been dumped in the trash after I died,” said Ebendorf. “But someone from the Smithsonian said that the documents were important, the story and the footprint of those who have passionately followed the path of their pursuit. It was like seeing your body on the slab. Very humbling.”

Makes No Distinction About Materials

One of the things that perhaps the organization has found most interesting about Bob’s work is the anomalous range of materials (one particular brooch is made up of aluminum, found metal, sterling silver, a doll arm, as well as painted tin) that he combines toward a single end.

Indeed, his art is everything from a flattened tin can that he found in the street, took home, and then faceted with precious gemstones, to ear rings incorporating  items such as broken glass from a beer bottle, clay, wood, beach pebble, plastic, copper stampings, glass beads, found olive oil cans, and metal jar lids.

From seashells, watch faces, dried up snakeskin, and ruined toys, to shards, dyed cotton cord, sardine cans, and cracked panes, he has breathed many layers of freshness into a whole host of timeworn bits and pieces. His course of action is one part skill, two parts celebration, and three parts accident.

“Chance is a big factor in the gathering process,” said Ebendorf. “Where did I walk? What dumpster or flea market or used book store did I visit that day?”

Spirit of Inquiry

Bob’s creativity is self-harmony, the smoothly aged union of body, mind, and spirit, implanted in the substance of his bones since a young age.  

Indeed, another tale that Bob likes to share as one of the origin stories of his curiosity recounts his mother and the one evening a week that the two of them would share at the local Presbyterian church. He would sit with her and they would make various arts and crafts projects. There would be long tables of materials to pick: string, plastic objects, brass, glitter, glue, postcards, fliers and circulars. This further infused in him the sense that the discarded could be lovingly salvaged; immersed in the exploration of resources, time lost significance.

Bob began making jewelry when he was in high school, and his teachers encouraged him to pursue his artistic whims. He attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence and obtained his BFA in 1960 in metal and jewelry design and his MFA in 1962 in three-dimensional design.

While he has always maintained reverence for traditional materials, his interest veered to the use of non-precious materials in the creation of personal adornment, the well-worn, disregarded, outmoded, and sometimes grotesque elements we toss aside (he has used crab claws and squirrel tails in assemblages).

“I come from an ABC beginning of skill, of a precious material like gold, which has quite a history,” said Ebendorf. “But I also found myself working with things that I got out of the dumpster or off the street. When I lived in New Paltz, New York (in the early 1970s), I was invited to teach at the 92^nd Street YMCA, and in the afternoons, and I’d stand before the display cases and I’d get all sorts of rich ideas. Look what people in Asia are doing with that piece of wood! They are carving it, sticking pieces of glass in it. There is wood, and string, and broken glass. Look at that!”

His memories of those moments when he was overcome by the most powerful feelings of creative renewal, the ones that shifted the very foundation of his thinking, are distinctly preserved.

 “I remember one time taking daughter to school in Santa Monica,” recalled Ebendorf. “I saw a car that had been broken into, and there were shards of glass, hundreds of little pieces on the ground. I scooped them up and took them back to the studio, and laid them out, and loved them.”

Ebendorf is the essence of the belief that knowledge is not only memory, but that every day there must be something new. Self-described as “computer illiterate,” he starts each morning by creating and mailing a couple of homemade postcards, constructing them out of random scraps of found paper.

By the time afternoon rolls around, he might be puttering in his studio (where a laboratory of objects awaits reincarnation) or scavenging the thrift or second-hand stores, or just gathering tin cans or broken bottles along the cracks in the sidewalk.

“Postcards and messing with paper are the start of my morning’s spiritual journey,” said Ebendorf. “My wife works nearby and she will come home and say, I looked out my window today and I saw you in the dumpster. What did you bring home?”

The eternal detective in Bob remains transfixed by the mystery of abandoned objects, his appetite for integrating natural and manmade fragments into his universe insatiable.

“You know what I do now? I go to the Santa Fe Library, which has an arts and crafts collage time, and I sift through the table of old books, stickers, postage stamps, and whatever else, and I sit there and make whatever I want to make.” 

Yet, perhaps the ultimate purpose of Bob’s erudition is not just to stay busy or to preserve the materials of past, but to serve the present and the future, through asking questions, and questioning himself, as well as by prodding others to take a deeper look at the dearly discarded and to exult in their rebirth.

Call him a magic maker. Or call him an innovative or provocative source. At heart, though, Bob considers himself nothing more than a playful soul who has gratefully managed to live out a daily connection to art. He understands that the day that his childlike wonderment fizzles out is the day that he falls behind.

“I realize that curiosity in my work fuels my tank,” concluded Ebendorf. “I celebrate that it puts fuel in my tank to travel a road less traveled.”