John F. Sendelbach ~ Shelburne Falls, MA
I couldn't spell menagerie in the sixth grade. It's the word that knocked me out of the spelling bee. I learned to spell it that day — but it took me about fifty years to build one. I didn't know that's what I was doing. Nobody does, at the time. You just make the next thing that's alive in front of you, and if you're the same person your whole life, the things pile up into a shape you can't see until you turn around. I've turned around. Here's the shape. It starts on a beach in the Adirondacks, up at the north end of Piseco Lake, where we vacationed. I'm about ten, and I build a turtle out of wet sand and rake rings into the beach around it. I didn't know then that I was siting a sculpture in its setting, or that a Zen garden in Kyoto had been doing the same thing with raked gravel for five hundred years — I'd learn that much later, in grad school, and love it, and recognize it, because I'd already done it as a kid. That's the whole story in one move: I keep walking into rooms that turn out to be furnished with my own furniture.
The House of Tools
I was born on May 11, 1966, in the front seat of a red Plymouth Valiant parked outside Buffalo's Mercy Hospital — the day Salvador Dalí turned sixty-two. Youngest of four — Mike's the biggest one in every picture, then Eileen, then Allen, then me. Working-class German-American family in Orchard Park, New York. Being the youngest granted a certain latitude and sharpened an early independence, forged through both freedom and friction. My father, Frederick "Fred" Sendelbach, was a sheet-metal contractor and draftsman; he grew up bilingual, German spoken in the house because it was easier for his mother, an immigrant from the Würzburg area. His own father died the day after Christmas in the late '30s, so my dad half-raised his mother the rest of her life, and we kept the rotation up — each of us kids took a turn going to visit the old German grandmother once a month. You go see the people who came before you, on a schedule. That got into everything I make. My mother was the counterbalance — a quiet steadiness that anchored the house.
The house was full of tools and the discipline of making, and I never stopped. Childhood was woods and fields and creek banks: Schwinn Stingrays, Hot Wheels, tree forts from scavenged lumber, bicentennial firecrackers, snow forts every winter, wood forts every summer, and models year-round — chopper bikes, motorless go-carts, detailed replicas of the White House and the Eiffel Tower, a cross-section of the hydrology of an artesian well with a typed paper to go with it. I was building the model-plus-document thing decades before I had a name for it. The White House model was good enough that the local paper ran a picture of me and it. I was the goofball who ruined every family photo, tongue out, and I want to be clear I wasn't ruining them. I was signing them.
The moment that really defines me came a little later, on the banks of Smokes Creek in Orchard Park. I wandered a construction site where steel girders lay stacked like silent monuments, picked up a rock, and hurled it at one. The girder rang out — a clear, resonant tone that cut the air and lodged in me permanently. That single sound became the foundational note of everything after: materials carry memory, they have voices, and the maker's job is to strike them so they speak across time.
Culture got in early too. At six, I felt the adult relief around the Vietnam ceasefire, without yet knowing its full name. In 1977 the Roots miniseries held our family transfixed at the television, and woke a visceral sense of history and justice and the long shadows the past throws. Music got in early and deep — Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here in eighth grade cracked something open. The Grateful Dead in '83 became a forty-year devotion: the concerts, the community, the improvisation, the countercultural spirit that still runs through everything I do. By my early twenties I was writing and playing my own songs on guitar. I put the writing down for a long time. It came back with a vengeance — but that's the end of the story, not the middle.
Learning the Ground
I graduated Orchard Park High in 1984, strong in science and math. College began in Boston with engineering, which felt soulless and misaligned with my real curiosities. The pivot was decisive: in spring 1989 I earned a B.S. in Floriculture and Ornamental Horticulture from Cornell. Amid the landscapes of Ithaca I learned living systems from the inside — nutrient cycles, root architecture, the intricate ways one environment sustains another. That planted the ecological intelligence everything since has stood on.
Back in western Massachusetts, I put it straight to work. In 1991 I founded Whirlwind Fine Garden Design in Amherst, a solo venture that became a partnership with Christopher Baxter. For most of a decade we designed and built residential landscapes across the Pioneer Valley — as many as twenty clients at once — enduring, site-responsive work: hand-laid stone walls rising out of the region's rocky soil, winding paths that respected topography, pergolas that framed views, garden structures that made architecture and landscape agree. I brought Cornell's horticulture and my father's metalwork to it, and I learned the thing I still believe hardest: don't tell me how to design a landscape until you've banged a nail and planted a shrub right. I picked up the shovel. That's the floor the whole practice stands on.
I enrolled in the Master of Landscape Architecture program at UMass Amherst in fall 1989, studying under Julius G. Fábos, Jack Ahern, Nicholas Dines, John Martin, Mark Lindholt, Jestena Boughton and their colleagues. The METLAND framework and the principles of adaptive resilience became foundational — sharpening how I read a layered landscape and design interventions that respect its ecological and cultural complexity. I didn't finish the degree; the pull of independent creation was stronger. But that way of seeing a site — at every scale, from a garden to a region — still structures everything I propose. I don't call myself a landscape architect. I'm something adjacent, and I've spent this year figuring out what to call it.
The Animals Arrive
Even while running the firm I'd begun placing permanent public work. In 1998 I won first place in the Amherst Public Arts Commission's request for public art, which became Crossroads Salamander at Cushman Common in North Amherst — a coiled dry-stone structure that's both walkway and bench, its spiraling tail drawn from local salamander migration routes. It became a local landmark that invites people to sit and think, and it's held up on affection rather than fortification.
The decade ended in a decisive turn. In 2000 I sold my stake in Whirlwind to Baxter. The catalyst was the Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton: I saw beautiful metal and stone objects and something clicked. The landscape years had given me technical mastery, client experience, and a deep respect for site and material. Now those tools would give permanent voice to the materials that first spoke to me on the banks of Smokes Creek.
I started with copper for its warmth and workability, then moved into steel, aluminum, and iron as scale and economics demanded. More and more I worked in the salvaged: flood-damaged electrical boxes, cutlery, railroad spikes, bicycle rims, washing-machine drums — turning what others read as waste into a sculptural language. The style became its own thing: sacred geometry crossed with Rube Goldberg and Alexander Calder whimsy, work animated by wind, water, light, and living plants. Spirals and labyrinths kept recurring — forms that pull people into movement and discovery instead of standing back and observing. And underneath it a philosophy I've come to phrase as the music plays the band: in deep flow, something impersonal seems to move through the hands, and each piece turns out to have been made for someone I hadn't met yet, whose response completes the work.
The public record began accumulating its own fauna. Crossroads Salamander (1998). Mill Canal Newt (2003), a stone memorial at the Mill River Recreation Area in Amherst, made for Heather Halsey in honor of her late husband, Kevin Maxwell Brown — the widow told me one of her dogs was named Newt and I said it made a cosmic connection; I've been calling things cosmic-but-not-magic for twenty-four years now. Minuteman Crossing (2005), a stone plaza ringing the UMass bronze Minuteman, made with Scotty Donald, which took a 2014 Honor Award from the Western Massachusetts chapter of the AIA. On the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls: the Trolley Gate (2010), the Pothole Fountain (2011, with stonemason Paul Forth and Julie Petty), and the River Bench (2014). Brookie the Trout (2013), a ten-foot brook trout fabricated from stainless-steel cutlery donated by Franklin County residents, honoring Greenfield as the site of America's first cutlery factory. And Old Diamondsides (2015), a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon welded from more than 1,700 pieces of salvaged utensils, with hand-made glass eyes by Jeremy Sinkus, unveiled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.
And in the studio, the ones that never went public: a crane of tools and andiron legs, a pig from a propane tank, a full-scale geodesic dinosaur out of copper tubing, more birds and pigs and dogs than I can count. Salamander, newt, trout, sturgeon, heron, dinosaur. Somewhere in there I'd built a whole bestiary and never once said the word.
In 2011 the work found a physical home: the Metal Stone Arts Gallery on State Street in Shelburne Falls, a red-clapboard studio and showroom near the Deerfield River and the Bridge of Flowers — towers of flood-rescued electrical boxes, mobiles of colanders and railroad spikes, stone vases beside tiny paperweights. It ran as a community hub until its sabbatical closure in 2020.
Dogs, Totems, and Return
The dogs belong here too. George came first — a German shepherd and toy collie mix, of all things, a girl with a boy's name, my dog through childhood, gone in 1984. Then two I adopted and lost too soon, both hit by cars: Seamus, a border collie, and Ripple. And then Totem — a shepherd/rottweiler mix, mostly shepherd, short-haired — who came to me already named, about sixteen months old, and made it all the way to 2012. She was the tennis-ball dog who could find a ball anywhere and then insisted you throw it, no negotiation. She was there for the whole sculpture life — sitting in the middle of my stone spirals, next to the welded animals, under a rainbow while I reached for a thrown ball.
My dog was named Totem, and she spent two decades sitting in the middle of a menagerie that didn't have its name yet. I'm not going to make that mystical. It's just true, and true is better. When I went to adopt her, my friend Julie came along with her dog Blue, and Totem and Blue became instant best friends — we traded dog-duty for years, Blue and then Pearl overlapping with Totem, a friendship measured in dogs across decades. After Totem I never had the heart to get another. Some animals you don't replace; you just keep.
The Larger Field
The work of the past decades converged in the early 2020s into something larger. In 2026 I named the practice I'd been building toward without knowing it: Translocalism — public art made as distributed networks of permanent installations, each one complete and legible where it stands, but gaining another dimension through its material, historical, ecological, and biographical relations to the others. Each work stands alone; together they form a greater argument. It treats biography as geography. Its methodology, its framing documents — Pocumtuck State of Mind, the survey I call Project Zero — and its roster of proposed figures live one layer deeper, in their own pages, where they can be given the room and the accountability they deserve. This is the memoir; that's the map.
The Music Plays the Band
And then the music came back — hard. I fed twenty-five-year-old lyrics into an AI music tool as a joke, upgraded on a whim, and fell straight into a flow state that produced a full discography of concept albums in a matter of weeks: a trilogy out of thirty years of building geodesic domes, a twelve-song descent, standalones, more in the wings. I build them like everything else — the whole architecture and tracklist before a single line, the songs generated last, an upside-down pyramid with the truth at the base and the dream at the point. I bring the framework and the taste; the machine brings the render; the work is the negotiation.
Somewhere in that flow I found that my own name — shortened to Bach for forty years by everyone who knows me — hides a fugue, and a Philip K. Dick story, and the very steel bugs I'd been welding out of silverware for years. Everything rhymes, because I'm the rhyme.
The Duck Signature
I got lucky on the timing. If this machine had reached me at twenty it would've been a crutch — I had no self yet for it to amplify. At sixty it's a revelation engine, because there was finally something built for it to amplify. My father, born 1925, died 2021 — one hell of a span — never flinched at the new tool; he embraced the computer and the internet as far as he could. I inherited the not-flinching. The timing just happened to fit my hand.
So: sculptor, landscape designer, nurseryman, metalworker, songwriter, about forty other things. I used to apologize for how many that is, or watch people's eyes glaze when I tried to list them. I don't anymore. It's not a list of jobs. It's a country, and these are its animals. I'm the guy who couldn't spell menagerie, and unknowingly built the thing he couldn't spell.
I keep an active studio in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, on the Deerfield River, where I welcome studio visits and commissions by appointment. And I sign my work with a duck —bach, bach, bach!
— John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, MA · ©2026
John F. Sendelbach ~ Shelburne Falls, MA
I couldn't spell menagerie in the sixth grade. It's the word that knocked me out of the spelling bee. I learned to spell it that day — but it took me about fifty years to build one. I didn't know that's what I was doing. Nobody does, at the time. You just make the next thing that's alive in front of you, and if you're the same person your whole life, the things pile up into a shape you can't see until you turn around. I've turned around. Here's the shape. It starts on a beach in the Adirondacks, up at the north end of Piseco Lake, where we vacationed. I'm about ten, and I build a turtle out of wet sand and rake rings into the beach around it. I didn't know then that I was siting a sculpture in its setting, or that a Zen garden in Kyoto had been doing the same thing with raked gravel for five hundred years — I'd learn that much later, in grad school, and love it, and recognize it, because I'd already done it as a kid. That's the whole story in one move: I keep walking into rooms that turn out to be furnished with my own furniture.
The House of Tools
I was born on May 11, 1966, in the front seat of a red Plymouth Valiant parked outside Buffalo's Mercy Hospital — the day Salvador Dalí turned sixty-two. Youngest of four — Mike's the biggest one in every picture, then Eileen, then Allen, then me. Working-class German-American family in Orchard Park, New York. Being the youngest granted a certain latitude and sharpened an early independence, forged through both freedom and friction. My father, Frederick "Fred" Sendelbach, was a sheet-metal contractor and draftsman; he grew up bilingual, German spoken in the house because it was easier for his mother, an immigrant from the Würzburg area. His own father died the day after Christmas in the late '30s, so my dad half-raised his mother the rest of her life, and we kept the rotation up — each of us kids took a turn going to visit the old German grandmother once a month. You go see the people who came before you, on a schedule. That got into everything I make. My mother was the counterbalance — a quiet steadiness that anchored the house.
The house was full of tools and the discipline of making, and I never stopped. Childhood was woods and fields and creek banks: Schwinn Stingrays, Hot Wheels, tree forts from scavenged lumber, bicentennial firecrackers, snow forts every winter, wood forts every summer, and models year-round — chopper bikes, motorless go-carts, detailed replicas of the White House and the Eiffel Tower, a cross-section of the hydrology of an artesian well with a typed paper to go with it. I was building the model-plus-document thing decades before I had a name for it. The White House model was good enough that the local paper ran a picture of me and it. I was the goofball who ruined every family photo, tongue out, and I want to be clear I wasn't ruining them. I was signing them.
The moment that really defines me came a little later, on the banks of Smokes Creek in Orchard Park. I wandered a construction site where steel girders lay stacked like silent monuments, picked up a rock, and hurled it at one. The girder rang out — a clear, resonant tone that cut the air and lodged in me permanently. That single sound became the foundational note of everything after: materials carry memory, they have voices, and the maker's job is to strike them so they speak across time.
Culture got in early too. At six, I felt the adult relief around the Vietnam ceasefire, without yet knowing its full name. In 1977 the Roots miniseries held our family transfixed at the television, and woke a visceral sense of history and justice and the long shadows the past throws. Music got in early and deep — Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here in eighth grade cracked something open. The Grateful Dead in '83 became a forty-year devotion: the concerts, the community, the improvisation, the countercultural spirit that still runs through everything I do. By my early twenties I was writing and playing my own songs on guitar. I put the writing down for a long time. It came back with a vengeance — but that's the end of the story, not the middle.
Learning the Ground
I graduated Orchard Park High in 1984, strong in science and math. College began in Boston with engineering, which felt soulless and misaligned with my real curiosities. The pivot was decisive: in spring 1989 I earned a B.S. in Floriculture and Ornamental Horticulture from Cornell. Amid the landscapes of Ithaca I learned living systems from the inside — nutrient cycles, root architecture, the intricate ways one environment sustains another. That planted the ecological intelligence everything since has stood on.
Back in western Massachusetts, I put it straight to work. In 1991 I founded Whirlwind Fine Garden Design in Amherst, a solo venture that became a partnership with Christopher Baxter. For most of a decade we designed and built residential landscapes across the Pioneer Valley — as many as twenty clients at once — enduring, site-responsive work: hand-laid stone walls rising out of the region's rocky soil, winding paths that respected topography, pergolas that framed views, garden structures that made architecture and landscape agree. I brought Cornell's horticulture and my father's metalwork to it, and I learned the thing I still believe hardest: don't tell me how to design a landscape until you've banged a nail and planted a shrub right. I picked up the shovel. That's the floor the whole practice stands on.
I enrolled in the Master of Landscape Architecture program at UMass Amherst in fall 1989, studying under Julius G. Fábos, Jack Ahern, Nicholas Dines, John Martin, Mark Lindholt, Jestena Boughton and their colleagues. The METLAND framework and the principles of adaptive resilience became foundational — sharpening how I read a layered landscape and design interventions that respect its ecological and cultural complexity. I didn't finish the degree; the pull of independent creation was stronger. But that way of seeing a site — at every scale, from a garden to a region — still structures everything I propose. I don't call myself a landscape architect. I'm something adjacent, and I've spent this year figuring out what to call it.
The Animals Arrive
Even while running the firm I'd begun placing permanent public work. In 1998 I won first place in the Amherst Public Arts Commission's request for public art, which became Crossroads Salamander at Cushman Common in North Amherst — a coiled dry-stone structure that's both walkway and bench, its spiraling tail drawn from local salamander migration routes. It became a local landmark that invites people to sit and think, and it's held up on affection rather than fortification.
The decade ended in a decisive turn. In 2000 I sold my stake in Whirlwind to Baxter. The catalyst was the Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton: I saw beautiful metal and stone objects and something clicked. The landscape years had given me technical mastery, client experience, and a deep respect for site and material. Now those tools would give permanent voice to the materials that first spoke to me on the banks of Smokes Creek.
I started with copper for its warmth and workability, then moved into steel, aluminum, and iron as scale and economics demanded. More and more I worked in the salvaged: flood-damaged electrical boxes, cutlery, railroad spikes, bicycle rims, washing-machine drums — turning what others read as waste into a sculptural language. The style became its own thing: sacred geometry crossed with Rube Goldberg and Alexander Calder whimsy, work animated by wind, water, light, and living plants. Spirals and labyrinths kept recurring — forms that pull people into movement and discovery instead of standing back and observing. And underneath it a philosophy I've come to phrase as the music plays the band: in deep flow, something impersonal seems to move through the hands, and each piece turns out to have been made for someone I hadn't met yet, whose response completes the work.
The public record began accumulating its own fauna. Crossroads Salamander (1998). Mill Canal Newt (2003), a stone memorial at the Mill River Recreation Area in Amherst, made for Heather Halsey in honor of her late husband, Kevin Maxwell Brown — the widow told me one of her dogs was named Newt and I said it made a cosmic connection; I've been calling things cosmic-but-not-magic for twenty-four years now. Minuteman Crossing (2005), a stone plaza ringing the UMass bronze Minuteman, made with Scotty Donald, which took a 2014 Honor Award from the Western Massachusetts chapter of the AIA. On the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls: the Trolley Gate (2010), the Pothole Fountain (2011, with stonemason Paul Forth and Julie Petty), and the River Bench (2014). Brookie the Trout (2013), a ten-foot brook trout fabricated from stainless-steel cutlery donated by Franklin County residents, honoring Greenfield as the site of America's first cutlery factory. And Old Diamondsides (2015), a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon welded from more than 1,700 pieces of salvaged utensils, with hand-made glass eyes by Jeremy Sinkus, unveiled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.
And in the studio, the ones that never went public: a crane of tools and andiron legs, a pig from a propane tank, a full-scale geodesic dinosaur out of copper tubing, more birds and pigs and dogs than I can count. Salamander, newt, trout, sturgeon, heron, dinosaur. Somewhere in there I'd built a whole bestiary and never once said the word.
In 2011 the work found a physical home: the Metal Stone Arts Gallery on State Street in Shelburne Falls, a red-clapboard studio and showroom near the Deerfield River and the Bridge of Flowers — towers of flood-rescued electrical boxes, mobiles of colanders and railroad spikes, stone vases beside tiny paperweights. It ran as a community hub until its sabbatical closure in 2020.
Dogs, Totems, and Return
The dogs belong here too. George came first — a German shepherd and toy collie mix, of all things, a girl with a boy's name, my dog through childhood, gone in 1984. Then two I adopted and lost too soon, both hit by cars: Seamus, a border collie, and Ripple. And then Totem — a shepherd/rottweiler mix, mostly shepherd, short-haired — who came to me already named, about sixteen months old, and made it all the way to 2012. She was the tennis-ball dog who could find a ball anywhere and then insisted you throw it, no negotiation. She was there for the whole sculpture life — sitting in the middle of my stone spirals, next to the welded animals, under a rainbow while I reached for a thrown ball.
My dog was named Totem, and she spent two decades sitting in the middle of a menagerie that didn't have its name yet. I'm not going to make that mystical. It's just true, and true is better. When I went to adopt her, my friend Julie came along with her dog Blue, and Totem and Blue became instant best friends — we traded dog-duty for years, Blue and then Pearl overlapping with Totem, a friendship measured in dogs across decades. After Totem I never had the heart to get another. Some animals you don't replace; you just keep.
The Larger Field
The work of the past decades converged in the early 2020s into something larger. In 2026 I named the practice I'd been building toward without knowing it: Translocalism — public art made as distributed networks of permanent installations, each one complete and legible where it stands, but gaining another dimension through its material, historical, ecological, and biographical relations to the others. Each work stands alone; together they form a greater argument. It treats biography as geography. Its methodology, its framing documents — Pocumtuck State of Mind, the survey I call Project Zero — and its roster of proposed figures live one layer deeper, in their own pages, where they can be given the room and the accountability they deserve. This is the memoir; that's the map.
The Music Plays the Band
And then the music came back — hard. I fed twenty-five-year-old lyrics into an AI music tool as a joke, upgraded on a whim, and fell straight into a flow state that produced a full discography of concept albums in a matter of weeks: a trilogy out of thirty years of building geodesic domes, a twelve-song descent, standalones, more in the wings. I build them like everything else — the whole architecture and tracklist before a single line, the songs generated last, an upside-down pyramid with the truth at the base and the dream at the point. I bring the framework and the taste; the machine brings the render; the work is the negotiation.
Somewhere in that flow I found that my own name — shortened to Bach for forty years by everyone who knows me — hides a fugue, and a Philip K. Dick story, and the very steel bugs I'd been welding out of silverware for years. Everything rhymes, because I'm the rhyme.
The Duck Signature
I got lucky on the timing. If this machine had reached me at twenty it would've been a crutch — I had no self yet for it to amplify. At sixty it's a revelation engine, because there was finally something built for it to amplify. My father, born 1925, died 2021 — one hell of a span — never flinched at the new tool; he embraced the computer and the internet as far as he could. I inherited the not-flinching. The timing just happened to fit my hand.
So: sculptor, landscape designer, nurseryman, metalworker, songwriter, about forty other things. I used to apologize for how many that is, or watch people's eyes glaze when I tried to list them. I don't anymore. It's not a list of jobs. It's a country, and these are its animals. I'm the guy who couldn't spell menagerie, and unknowingly built the thing he couldn't spell.
I keep an active studio in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, on the Deerfield River, where I welcome studio visits and commissions by appointment. And I sign my work with a duck —bach, bach, bach!
— John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, MA · ©2026