Nicholas Benson | |
|---|---|
 Benson in 2007 | |
| Born | August 19, 1964 |
| Education | State University of New York at Purchase, Schule für Gestaltung Basel |
| Known for | Stone carving, Typography |
| Awards | MacArthur Fellow National Heritage Fellowship |
Nicholas Waite "Nick" Benson (born August 19, 1964) is a third generation American stone carver, stone letterer and owner of The John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island. He was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. [1]
Nick Benson began working in his family business, The John Stevens Shop at age fifteen for his father, John Everett Benson. Nick is a third generation stone carver and letterer. [2] He studied Drawing and Design at State University of New York at Purchase in 1986. Benson spent 1987 at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel in Basel, Switzerland where he studied calligraphy, type design, typography, and drawing under Andre Gurtler, Christian Mengelt and Armin Hofmann. [3]
He returned to the U.S. in 1988 and continued to work under John Benson in The John Stevens Shop. His father passed on the business to him in 1993. [4] Benson expands the traditional arts of hand lettering and stone carving through his designs. He is also committed to teaching young artisans, in the hopes that they will go on to create their own works and thereby ensure that the legacy of this centuries-old artistic practice endures. He has had several design students, especially from nearby Rhode Island School of Design, and apprentices work with him in the shop and on projects.
His uncle was the American photographer Richard Benson. Richard Benson was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1986, making the Bensons one of two families with multiple MacArthur fellows. [5]
Benson has created a distinctive architectural lettering for these architectural and monumental commissions, with careful attention to the effects that large scale, shifting light, and long-term weathering have on the letters, as well as carefully crafting very small details of each letter. "The entire composition is key," he explained in an interview with the architectural historian Judith Dupré, "but the proportion of the letter, the design of the particular letter form itself, is extremely important too. Equally important is the cadence of the text, how counterspace is used, word spacing, line spacing—all of that is absolutely crucial to good inscriptional carving." [6] He developed an original font that draws on both classical Greek letter forms and contemporary sans serif lettering for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, on the National Mall.
Benson's work at The John Stevens Shop has also included personal gravestones and tomb markers. Benson's father, grandfather and his predecessors at the Shop have created individual gravestones on materials including grey slate and Rhode Island granite. [3]
His carvings can be found in the National Gallery of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, at Brown University, and in Washington D.C., the National World War II Memorial and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.
He is a recipient of a 2007 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States' highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. [7]
Benson lives in Jamestown, Rhode Island, with his wife and two children.
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Gill as "the greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter-cutter and type designer of genius", he is also a figure of considerable controversy following the revelations of his sexual abuse of two of his daughters and of his pet dog.
The year 1984 in architecture involved some significant architectural events and new buildings.
Cephas Thompson was a successful, largely self-taught, early nineteenth-century itinerant portrait painter in the United States. He was born, died, and lived most of his life in Middleborough, Massachusetts, but traveled extensively down the Atlantic coast and lived far from home for months at a time while pursuing his career as a portraitist.
Ye Antientist Burial Ground is a cemetery in New London, Connecticut, bounded by Hempstead Street on the west and Huntington Street on the east, running from Granite Street to approximately Bristol Street. It has been known by several names over the years, many spelling variations on Ancient Burial Ground. It is one of the earliest graveyards in New England and the oldest colonial cemetery in New London County. The hillside lot of 1.5 acres and adjoins the site of New London's first meeting house. The settlement at the time was called "Pequot Plantation" until the name changed in 1658. From the burial grounds, the visitor has a broad view to the east of the Thames River and, on the far shore, the heights of Groton, Connecticut.
Charles I. D. Looff was a Danish master carver and builder of hand-carved carousels and amusement rides, who immigrated to the United States of America in 1870. Looff built the first carousel at Coney Island in 1876. During his lifetime, he built over 40 carousels, several amusements parks, numerous roller coasters and Ferris wheels, and built California's famous Santa Monica Pier. He became famous for creating the unique Coney Island style of carousel carving.
Michael Harvey MBE was an English lettering artist, teacher, and writer specialising in lettering, type design, and letter cutting. His work appears in many English cathedrals and on the National Gallery, London.1
David Guy Barnabas Kindersley MBE was a British stone letter-carver and typeface designer, and the founder of the Kindersley Workshop. His carved plaques and inscriptions in stone and slate can be seen on many churches and public buildings in the United Kingdom. Kindersley was a designer of the Octavian font for Monotype Imaging in 1961, and he and his third wife Lida Lopes Cardozo designed the main gates for the British Library.
Judith Dupré is a writer, structural historian, and public speaker. She is the New York Times bestselling author of several works of narrative nonfiction on art, design, and architecture. She has been described as “a scholar with a novelist’s eye for detail and a journalist’s easy style.”
The Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery are a pair of separate cemeteries on Farewell and Warner Street in Newport, Rhode Island. Together they contain over 5,000 graves, including a colonial-era slave cemetery and Jewish graves. The pair of cemeteries was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a single listing in 1974.
The John Stevens Shop, founded in 1705, is a stone carving business on Thames Street in Newport, Rhode Island, that is one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in the United States.
John Everett Benson, known as Fud, was an American calligrapher, stonecarver, typeface designer and sculptor who created inscriptions for monuments including the John F. Kennedy memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, the National Gallery of Art, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC.
Richard Mead Atwater Benson was an American photographer, printer, and educator who used photographic processing techniques of the past and present.
John Hegnauer is an American stone carver.
Letter cutting is a form of inscriptional architectural lettering closely related to monumental masonry and stone carving, often practised by artists, sculptors, and typeface designers. Rather than traditional stone carving, where images and symbols are the dominant features, in letter cutting the unique skill is "meticulous setting out and skilled cutting of the lettering style, in terms of design, angle and depth of the lettering".
Letter carvers see the drawing and carving of letters as a particular craft in itself, allied to but distinct from masonry and carving in general. Most letter carvers are both designers and carvers. Typefaces designed for printing are rarely satisfactory when carved into stone, so most letter carvers design their own letterforms.
Funerary art in Puritan New England encompasses graveyard headstones carved between c. 1640 and the late 18th century by the Puritans, founders of the first American colonies, and their descendants. Early New England Puritan funerary art conveys a practical attitude towards 17th-century mortality; death was an ever-present reality of life, and their funerary traditions and grave art provide a unique insight into their views on death. The minimalist decoration and lack of embellishment of the early headstone designs reflect the British Puritan and Anglo-Saxon religious cultures.
The Rhode Island Tercentenary half dollar is a commemorative fifty-cent piece struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1936. The coin was designed by John Howard Benson and Arthur Graham Carey. Its obverse depicts Roger Williams, founder of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. It was intended to honor the 300th anniversary of Providence, Rhode Island, although it bears no mention of the city.
John Howard Benson was an American calligrapher, stonecarver, incised letter designer, author, and educator.
Rhode Island Slave History Medallions, or RISHM, is a statewide non-profit organization based in Newport, Rhode Island. RISHM's mission is to raise public awareness of Rhode Island’s dominant role in the institution of slavery. RISHM marks historic sites and homes with a bronze plaque, or medallion, in communities around the state connected to slavery, to commemorate lives of the enslaved, and open a dialogue for racial understanding and healing.
Bryant Olcher Fedden was a self-taught letter-cutter, glass engraver and sculptor who developed his craft in a workshop environment with craftspeople whom he taught and supported. He was a member of the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen for more than forty years. He was a founder member of the Letter Exchange, a professional organisation promoting lettering in all its forms. Bryant Fedden has work in the Victoria and Albert Museum Collections.