Objects of Affection: Jewelry by Robert Ebendorf from the Porter • Price Collection

Both a great survey and monograph of the life, creative spirit and career of Robert W. Ebendorf, whose work challenges cultural preconceptions about jewelry.

Objects of Affection presents 50 pieces by Ebendorf covering the full span of his career from the 1950s to the 2010s, and encompasses major themes in his work, from Scandinavian modernism, and the use of found objects—crab claws, sea glass, plastic, paper—, and recycled products of industry—keys, buttons, beer bottle caps, washers, wire mesh, tubing—to textual and ephemeral elements and Catholic iconography, to create dynamic, sometimes highly eccentric jewellery.

Unique features of this volume are its special focus on Ebendorf’s work of the last two decades, its inclusion of selected works by graduate students taught by Ebendorf at East Carolina University (ECU), where he led the jewelry program from 1997 to 2016, and its presentation of numerous collages and sketches by Ebendorf included by him in many of the letters and postcards he has written over the course of his career, and especially those he has exchanged (and continues to exchange) since the late 1990s with Ron Porter and Joe Price, who talk with Ebendorf every week, and who write to one another most days . Many of these letters include printed ephemera, in addition to sketches. And it is this ephemeral and archival aspect of the Porter ˑ Price Collection which sets it apart from other publications on Ebendorf’s work.