Montclair, NJ-Robert Ebendorf was recycling the ordinary things that society discards long before “re-purposing” became a fashionable buzzword. His jewelry charms and delights the eye and the mind without the need for the use of precious materials. Encouraged by his mother to follow his artistic bent as a child growing up in Kansas, he went on to receive a degree in Metal and Jewelry Design from the University of Kansas, Lawrence followed by a Master’s degree in 3-Dimensional Design. He is equally loved and respected as a teacher-mentor and an artist. He has taught at the State University of New York at New Paltz and a number of important craft schools and has been the Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC since 1999. He also worked in Oslo, Norway, first on a Fulbright scholarship and later with a Louis Comfort Tiffany grant. A founding member of SNAG, the Society of North American Goldsmiths, he became one of its first presidents. He is considered by many to be one of the most outstanding figures in American craft today. Many of Ebendorf’s earlier works incorporated words in the design. As Marjorie Simon says in an essay she wrote for the The Jewelry of Robert Ebendorf: A Forty Year Retrospective: Printed text often serves as an unintelligible but ever-present background radiation, as in the three famous paper and Styrofoam bead necklaces of the 1980s. Constructed of two-inch diameter high-density Styrofoam balls covered with Japanese paper and gold foil, they were considered a landmark acquisition by the Victoria and Albert Museum because of the non-precious materials. They are also notable because of Ebendorf’s continuous use of unreadable, fragmented text on the surface. 
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ROBERT EBENDORF'S WORK TO BE SHOWN AT GALLERY LOUPE
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