Transylvania University art professor Kurt Gohde has received a Fulbright award to hand-carve a series of wooden coffee spoons in Romania’s Transylvania region.
The project will give people a chance to “have coffee with” notable figures from the country’s cultural past.
Gohde will be hosted by the Târgu Mureș University of Arts while he works on the project, which is sponsored by the Ultra Salix Cultural Association in Târgu Mureș.
The initiative extends a personal artistic project Gohde began several years ago after collecting a fallen branch from a tree that once stood near poet Allen Ginsberg’s home in upstate New York. He carved the wood into coffee scoops and has since gathered branches from trees associated with other historical figures, including Flannery O’Connor, Walt Whitman, Shirley Jackson, Henry David Thoreau, John Steinbeck and Jack London.
“Ultimately, these spoons will be utilized by people who want to ‘share a coffee’ with the people who lived alongside the trees,” he said. “It is a project that acknowledges the ability trees have to bring in, contain and hold the lives of (even the nutrients from) the people and animals who live around them.”
Fittingly for a professor at Transylvania, Gohde had already forged a connection to the region in Romania from studying traditional decorative wood carving on historic homes; he drew particular inspiration from sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. The 18-day research trip last summer was supported by a David and Betty Jones Faculty Development Grant.
Gohde plans to identify historical Romanians who contemporary locals would most like to “have coffee with” for the Fulbright project. He will then locate trees that stood near where they lived and carve custom spoons that reference them. He also plans to collaborate with area coffee roasters to create special roasts specifically for serving with the spoons.
“One scoop will be left with a coffee shop in that town, where they can use it to serve coffee for folks who want to have coffee with that person, and another will be housed at the Ultra Salix Cultural Association in Târgu Mureş,” Gohde noted. “As a sponsor of my Fulbright, Ultra Salix Cultural Association will receive a full collection of the spoons I create while in Romania.”
The project is rooted in a familiar question.
“It is not uncommon to hear a conversation beginning with: ‘If you could have coffee with anyone throughout history, who would it be?’” Gohde said. “This project is built around that question — using the wood from trees that were witness to the lives of interesting people from the past to create coffee spoons that will perhaps contain some of that person’s way of being in the world.”