Quarra Stone Co. President Jim Durham has noticed the monument business picking up considerably, not necessarily due to recent racial unrest and the controversy surrounding Confederate statues, but due to a reexamination of our history as growing numbers of people insist on commemorating previously overlooked historical events and figures.
The monument controversy recently hit home as demonstrators, apparently unaware that not every Civil War statue depicts someone who was part of the Confederacy, marched on Wisconsin’s State Capitol and took down the Forward Statue and a monument depicting Civil War hero Col. Hans Christian Heg, an anti-slavery Norwegian immigrant who gave his life in service to the Union army.
Since then, and somewhat incredibly, even statues of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglas have been taken down, but those mistakes can be corrected with help of companies like Quarra Stone, a recognized expert in natural stone, including fine art and historic preservation. Durham certainly isn’t lamenting all the new trends because that piece of business, along with fine art monuments, represents one-third of the Madison company’s annual revenue — and it’s growing.
The start-to-finish process of designing (with the help of talented artists), building, and installing a new monument can be quite involved, requiring the fabrication of hundreds of different pieces and stones. A recently completed memorial to 5,000 enslaved laborers who helped build the University of Virginia in Charlottesville had been in the works since 2008, when UVA students demanded the university recognize its history of slave labor by honoring laborers who lived and worked at the university, founded by Thomas Jefferson, between 1817 and 1865.
Not every memorial takes quite that long, but in most cases it’s a multiyear effort. “Each project has its own path,” Durham notes. “Each community has its own way of doing things.”
For Durham, the most enduring aspect of the UVA enslaved labor memorial is that while a scheduled grand opening was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020’s other traumatic development, the police-involved murder of George Floyd, convinced graduating medical students to make the new monument the site of a vigil to honor Floyd. “That was cool because that’s the way that space is supposed to work,” Durham states. “It should be a gathering point for communication, conversation, and remembrance.”
Projects cover the gamut, from depicting historical realities such as slavery, discrimination, and acts of violence, to honoring legacies and historical achievements, to celebrating Nobel recipients. To create each memorial, Quarra Stone may use tools like 3D modeling and 7-axis robotics, but it combines them with European-style, master-carving skills.
The Madison-based firm has worked on an impressive variety of monuments, including one to the people who perished in a 2015 act of workplace violence in San Bernardino, California. The company is currently working on a sculpture for Harlem in New York City with a climate change theme, it’s consulting for prominent projects such as the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago (a mock-up wall is in place), and it’s in the process of making mock-ups for Maya Lin, artist and architect of the Vietnam Memorial, and Martin Puryear of A Column for Sally Hemings sculpture fame, among many other projects.
Monuments can run into the millions of dollars, often because they are the focal point of a neighborhood or a community. Today, creating a contemporary expression of history can involve very complex geometry and other elaborate features. The UVA project incorporated tapestries that were made by slaves and originally used to signal that people were traveling on the path of the Underground Railroad, which secretly transported escaping slaves to the north.
As people approach the memorial, designed by artist Eto Otitigbe, they will notice the eyes of laborer Isabelle Gibbons carved into the V-curve of two panels, and those eyes watch people who enter the circular memorial. Within the memorial are the names of identified enslaved laborers and corresponding “memory marks” that represent flesh wounds, and as people depart the memorial, they do so on the “Path to Freedom.”
No lockdown
Since Quarra Stone works in construction and fabrication, it was deemed an essential business and was able to remain open during the COVID-19 lockdown. Quarra management split its team into two shifts to limit the number of people in the shop and accommodate physical distancing requirements. Support staff works from home as much as possible thanks to virtual meetings, and the company is hiring.
Durham notes that Quarra Stone would like to be involved in restoration of the statues at the Wisconsin State Capitol, and it has been in discussions with decision-makers, but it’s a competitive process and a number of companies are interested. The company is certainly no stranger to local projects, having fabricated panels now featured in Alumni Park on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus, where the achievements of more than 100 of the UW’s most distinguished alumni are recognized and honored.
The satisfactions of monument work can be enormous — even celebratory — for Quarra Stone employees and those who collaborate with them. When a statue of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was taken down in Richmond, Virginia, a Quarra worker named Eddie was the only member of the crew to have his name on the back of his vest, causing the assembled crowd to repeatedly shout his name — “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!” — as the statue came down.
Perhaps the proudest project the company has been involved with is the I AM A MAN memorial in Memphis, Tennessee. It honors the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 Sanitation Workers Strike, which culminated with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Working with artist Cliff Garten, Quarra Stone carved the marble gates and fabricated black granite columns, the granite timeline, and the dedicatory wall.
When the statue was unveiled, Durham was honored to meet dignitaries such as the late Congressman John Lewis, who worked with King during the height of the civil rights movement, and even some of the sanitation workers who had gone on strike five decades earlier. “We were very moved by it,” Durham recalls. “To experience that together with them gives real meaning to the work that we do.”
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