Where It All Started: Ned Crouch
Students with Endada c, 1977
Few people may know that the namesake of Montgomery Bell Academy’s Music and Arts Festival, Endada, was a sculpture on MBA’s campus in the 1970s. ENDADA was sculpted by Ned Crouch, an artist living in Clarksville, TN and commissioned by Louise LeQuire, MBA’s first art teacher. Ned Crouch attended Cranbrook Academy of Art, was a professor at Austin Peay State University, and was a member of the original Cheekwood acquisition team.
ENDADA was an abstract sculpture constructed of steel beams painted two parts International Orange and one part Safety Red. The beams were arranged in a lattice-like structure in a similar manner to the works of Mark di Suvero, or in the stabile structure of Alexander Calder. The same energy that is present in di Suvero’s and Calder’s work is what we feel in the ENDADA sculpture. The MBA community was ahead of their time by having this work of art on campus. At some point the sculpture was damaged and removed from campus.
In 2011, during discussions about what to name the newly formed music and arts festival, former art teacher Jim Womack proposed to the students to name the festival after the lost sculpture, remembering its name to be ENDADA.
In 2018, Webb Hunt (‘19) created a small scale model of the sculpture based off polaroids given to him by Mr. Womack. Later that year, Webb Hunt’19, and Brown Payne’20, and art teacher Catharine Hollifield visited Ned in Clarksville to learn more about this influential artist and his work.
