Nicholas Benson

@

2020, black slate, 38”h x 24”w x 2-1/2d”

location: Town Hall, 93 Narragansett Avenue.

GPS 41.49606, -71.37411

http://www.johnstevensshop.com

Artist’s Statement

For twenty–five years I have designed and carved inscriptions in stone for notable civic memorials, private institutions and personal monuments throughout the United States. I have made hundreds of carefully hand-drawn and hand-carved headstones, dedicatory tablets and building facade inscriptions. I am the third generation of my family to carry on our business and the ninth generation of carvers to continue it on the site where it was founded. Our business has been producing work in the vein of classical inscriptions for over three hundred years. I have maintained a set of standards in craft, design and tradition that has persevered through trends of mechanization and modernization to remain very nearly unchanged since the business was founded in 1705. In fact, our work is remarkably similar to inscriptions carved thousands of years ago. We are an odd business in this day and age of digitization, computer driven production and mass marketing. I received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010 that allowed me to explore a new thread of artistically expressive and intellectual work I that I had long hoped to develop. This work began as a study in classical stone carving methods influenced by contemporary, urban calligraphic forms. My method in both lettering and carving is influenced by the ancient tradition I have learned and practiced for decades. Within the parameters of this tradition I have, like all of the carvers who preceded me, developed a personal, stylistic vocabulary that inevitably informs these new explorations. One of the driving forces of this experiment is the conflict between, and confluence of, my accumulated skill and the freedom of the unbridled hand. Beyond these matters of process, I am interested in the scientific, mathematic and informational languages of the digital age, and the tremendous amount of knowledge that is broadening our understanding of the universe. My current work is inspired by the unfathomable quantity of digital information now globally disseminated on a daily basis. Of the many languages used in the digital realm, the vast majority of us do not understand any of them. On the whole, inscriptions in stone have traditionally recorded the praise and memory of Gods, men and events, or the simple identification of geographic locations and structures. These new inscriptions are in contrast to preconceptions of what is deemed worthy for perpetuity. The text is not primarily literal but symbolic and representative of human progress and the greater questions that arise in light of it. I am seeking a means of expressing the age-old desire to indelibly record and reflect upon the progress of humankind.

Biography

Nicholas Benson began an apprenticeship at The John Stevens Shop at the age of fifteen with his father, John Benson, in 1979. The John Stevens Shop, founded in 1705, specializes in the design and execution of one of a kind inscriptions in stone. Architectural and memorial lettering is generated by hand with a broad edged brush in the manner of classical Roman inscriptions and then carved into stone with mallets and chisels. Benson studied drawing and design at State University of New York at Purchase in 1986. He spent 1987 at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland, studying calligraphy, type design and typography, 

He returned to the U.S. in 1988 and continued to work under John Benson. His father passed the business on to him in 1993. Benson expands the traditional arts of hand lettering and stone carving through his designs. He has produced several site-specific typefaces for use on many large civic memorials. 

His work includes the National World War II Memorial inscriptions in Washington, DC; the National Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial inscriptions in Washington, DC; the Louis I. Kahn, Four Freedoms Park inscriptions in New York City. 

In 2007 Benson was awarded an NEA National Heritage Fellowship. In 2010 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2013 he received an Artist-in Residence Fellowship at the Yale University Art Gallery. He is currently working on the National Eisenhower Memorial inscriptions in Washington, DC. 

Watch documentary on Nicholas Benson by Networks Rhode Island