Gordon Kellenberger: Transcript

Amana Aarts Guild
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My name is Gordon Kellenberger. I live here in the Amana Colonies, and I was born and raised here. I was born in Upper South, brought into the world by a midwife, a neighbor, in 1942. At that time, even in the Amanas, people were born, had their birth in their own home. We lived very inter-generationally. I lived with my grandparents, of course my parents, my aunt and uncle, and my great-aunt. Really, you can divide the home into various comfortable living quarters so that, in a way, you’re living together, and in a way you have your own space. Like a lot of people today, I’ll tell you, people just don’t quite have the tolerance that they once did. And everybody seems to be pretty independent nowadays. So, it’s a little more difficult in that respect. But, it’s still being done.

Well, one of the things about the Amanas is they have such large homes. And, so, it makes it very workable. The only time I really went very far away was to go to college for a few years. And I came back to be an art teacher, and now I’m a full time artist. Also, I’m involved with the Amana Arts Guild, one of the founders. And back in 1978, we, a group crafts people and artisans in the Amanas, got together and started working on different ways where maybe we can get together from time to time to visit about various issues and kind of help promote each other’s work and kind of encourage each other. And out of that grew the Amana arts guild. Today the Amana arts guild is basically what you’d call a community arts council. We not only promote all the arts, like many arts councils do, we really promote and help preserve and encourage and celebrate our cultural heritage traditions.

We’ve had a rich tradition of painters here in the Amanas, dating back to right before the Great Change in 1932. Karl Flick was probably one of the earliest well known painters. And he worked a great deal with Grant Wood. Grant Wood used to come to the Amanas a great deal and help him with his painting and give him some instruction. In fact, they used to paint together, and John Noye after that. So, they generally painted the Amana environment. And so, I got real influenced by their work. and did that for a number of years—worked in watercolor, oils and acrylics. And today, I’ve switched to pastels, and I’m probably a little more interested in the Iowa landscape today than the Amana environment, but still do that on occasion.

And then we also have a pottery studio at home. And I try to reflect some of the culture of the community and some of its motifs and symbols through my pottery. I’ve collected pottery that was made by our early forefathers. Actually, they didn’t make pottery in Amana, but they did make pottery in New York. They lived near Buffalo, called Ebenezer, New York for ten years and had five villages there. And they did have a full-time pottery shop there. Instead of the brown glazes that they used, we use an Amana blue glaze. Years ago, all the interiors of all the buildings--the churches, work places, homes were all painted blue or whitewashed blue as kind of a symbolic color or heavenly color, Godly color.

Amana folks, the ladies, still do a lot of quilting today. And they do the whole cloth quilts. And we’ve taken some of the stencils they use and, which are generally geometric or floral, and reduced them into a small design and use those on our crocks and some of our other containers we make. So, we try to reflect some things of the Amanas in our work.