CAMAS — Uta Zuendel’s admiration for art stretches back decades, but she had a few things to do before focusing on her own work.
First, she had to see her two children off to college. Then, she had to give back enough to make up for the help she received throughout her life, which started 73 years ago in then-East Germany.
To get from East to West Germany, Zuendel was upholstered into the backseat of a car. After the death of her first husband, she was alone in America without a job and didn’t speak much English. Friends from East Germany smuggled her school transcripts from the University of Leipzig, which showed her medical training and work as a nurse.
“I went to the first hospital close to where we lived, and I presented my papers,” she said. “Luck again, the director of nursing was German and she could read my papers. She hired me and said, ‘What a wonderful thing. You can learn English with the patients.’ ”
It was a relief for Zuendel, who eventually remarried, had two children and moved to Camas, where she became an advocate for revitalizing downtown and reconnected with art by working in galleries. Zuendel’s wood sculptures are on display at the Camas Gallery, 408 N.E. Fourth Avenue, where she is the December Artist of the Month.
In the Camas Gallery, she has a piece titled “Courtship,” which shows two birds with long necks intertwined, and another called “From Cradle to Cradle,” which has a plaque that reads: “keep the balance” and has a ball that rolls along the top of the piece, but always ends up in the center.
“I’m all over the place and nowhere,” she said.
Once Zuendel sets her mind to something, she’s going to do it, as longtime Camas residents know.
In the mid-1980s, Zuendel attended a few meetings of a committee tasked with improving downtown Camas. She was not impressed. She said the committee just talked about ideas, but nothing got done.
“I quit the committee, and this is when I went out on my own,” she said. “I had no funds. What I did then could probably never be done today, because everything has to be approved.”
Zuendel went around downtown along Fourth Avenue planting more than 60 hanging baskets and in-ground plantings, and put up a “Welcome to Camas” sign. She also started the Plant & Garden Fair, which is in its 19th year, to raise funds she used to revitalize downtown. Eventually, the city came onboard and helped to add a water fountain, seating wall and new lighting.
Twice Zuendel got pneumonia while planting her baskets, and she recruited help in the form of visitors from Germany, who she made head downtown to tend to her plants while they were staying with her.
Zuendel said she thinks people should help others while making time to do things for themselves. For her, that meant creating art.
“Everybody, unknowingly or knowingly, is yearning to express themselves in one way or another in many hundreds of thousands of way,” she said.
Some of Zuendel’s pieces were inspired by trips she took with her partner, Francher Donaldson. In their home, a house Zuendel designed and built with her second husband and their two children in 1974, she has a piece detailing what she saw while snorkeling in the Caribbean and another featuring the Flatiron Building from a trip to New York.
A piece above their organ is made to look like an audience is giving a standing ovation.
Zuendel said she doesn’t sit down with ideas. Instead, she takes some wood, starts to sculpt it and lets the piece develop.
“It takes me a month to start a piece,” she said. “Then, once I begin, it goes lickity split.”
While she started working with clay for her own artwork, she moved to wood sculpting after working with her mentor, Leroy Setziol.
One thing Zuendel prefers about wood is that it’s forgiving. It’s a trait she shares.
When talking about her life, Zuendel is understanding about the four-day period when she was grilled by American military officers after defecting to West Germany. She said it was perfectly normal for the FBI to show up on her doorstep after her second husband returned from a trip to Germany with their baby daughter. And she thought it made sense when that same husband was denied a management job because his company wanted only Americans in management.
She doesn’t display any anger about the car accident that killed her first husband a year after the two moved to California from West Germany, nor the cancer that took her second husband when he was 45, leaving her alone with their two children.
“Your ability to cope will rise with challenges given to you no matter what,” Zuendel said. “You have to recognize your abilities and strengths, and not feel bad for yourself. It’s up to you.”
Zuendel was honored by the city of Camas for her volunteer work, and now a plaque with her name on it sits near the fountain just outside of the Camas Gallery. She didn’t do it for accolades or attention, though.
She said she did it to give back, because she feels she received so much support throughout her own life.
“Without the incredible generosity of American people, generosity in their time and support, not material things, I could not experience what I experienced,” she said. “To be with people who are positive and forward looking is an incredible gift.”
