JAC TALK with Nick Benson
Wednesday, June 16
7:30 - 8:30 pm
Watch the recorded program below
Join Nick Benson for an artist talk on the process and inspiration behind his piece @ from the 2020 Outdoor Arts Experience
Benson was one of 10 artists chosen for the Island-wide outdoor exhibition celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Jamestown Arts Center.
“The 20th century saw a tremendous shift in human societal and economic structure with the advent and application of mass production on a vast scale. After Work War II the average human’s connection to the physical world - the way in which we could produce a variety of things with our own hands - diminished. Particularly in the United States, the idea of making money for money's sake became a driving force that supplanted the philosophy at the heart of our simple motto “Made in America.”
Processes in refining and accelerating the efficiency of our societal structures lead to digital technology. As much as this evolution has been an unarguably beneficial leap it has also brought deeper philosophical questions about the nature of human interaction. Mass media and the onslaught of information, that is not only accessible but often unavoidable, has left us wondering who we are and what we want of ourselves and our country. This can be seen so clearly today in racial conflict, economic inequality and even insurrection.I choose to use my age old craft ( a practice that is as old as humanity itself ) as a symbol of human history, and I set it in conflict with the nature of digital information - information that often lasts for only a nano second. I hope to immediately provoke questions for the viewer. What does is say? What does it mean? Who are we? Where are we going?!
This statement is not all bleak. It also speaks to the capacity of the human mind. Digital technology is an amazing achievement.
Look what we can do when we set our minds to it. Can we change the things that we must?”
-Nick Benson
Nick Benson, @, 2020
Black slate, 38” x 24” x 2.5” Located at Town Hall, 93 Narragansett Avenue during the Outdoor Arts Experience, June - October, 2020.
About the Artist:
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 Basel School of Design in Basel, Switzerland, studying calligraphy, type design and typography.
He returned to the U.S. in 1988 and continued to work under John Benson, taking over the family business in 1993. Benson expands the traditional arts of hand lettering and stone carving through his designs. He has produced 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 and the Eisenhower Memorial inscriptions in Washington, CD.
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. For the past eight years he has been making a series of artistic works in contemplation of communication in the Information Age.