“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”
—Gustav Mahler

On a quaint street in the historic district of Newport, Rhode Island, sits a forest green colonial-era shop. Above the front door and window, expertly carved stone letters read: “ The John Stevens Shop ♢ Stone Carving and Lettering ♢ Founded AD 1705.” Inside, stacks of brown tracing paper layered with calligraphic writings in varying styles and sizes cover the surfaces, while mallets and chisels wait patiently on the worktable.

You might expect to find Nicholas Benson, a third-generation stone carver and letterer, quietly at work creating the beautifully designed inscriptional work seen on memorials and public buildings across Washington, D.C., and beyond. Instead, he is deeply focused on an intricate work of conceptual art, delicately carving what he calls the AI Warning tablet, an artistic exploration of the complex relationship between digital and physical realms.

Benson shared his masterful carving skills and his perspectives on hand craftsmanship and computer technology at the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, along with his daughter Hope Benson and the many other skilled artisans in the building arts who participated in the Festival’s Next Generation Artisans in the Traditional Building Trades program.

In an interview after the Festival, Benson reflected on how he has watched the digital world take shape over the course of his career. He began his apprenticeship in 1979, spending countless hours observing his father, carving his exquisite designs in stone, absorbing the disciplined art of hand lettering. Today, he continues the family legacy with a meticulous, holistic process: first designing the letterforms that best fit the words and context of an inscription, then painting the letters by hand on large sheets of tracing paper, making subtle stylistic adjustments in anticipation of how they will translate into stone. Once approved by the client, he transfers the design onto the stone with a broad edged brush and carves it, finishing each letter with trained precision and an artistic eye.

This devotion to every stage of the craft—from design to execution—has earned Benson both the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship and the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, as well as commissions for major monuments and public buildings across the country, just like his father and grandfather before him.

As Benson’s inscriptional work became increasingly refined, so did technological advancements in the field of stone carving. He recalls moments in his career when individuals from other teams working on a memorial or institutional building would question his traditional methods, pointing to the fact that new machines could complete the lettering more efficiently than a hand carver. It felt like they were essentially saying, “There is no need for you to do this. There is no value in your work.” To master a craft passed down through generations and across centuries, only to be told a machine could replace it, evokes something deeper than frustration. For Benson, this was a “tipping point” in his career—the foundation of his complex relationship with the digital world.

“The computer is changing the human perspective of aesthetics,” Benson says, noting that today most real-world items, buildings, and monuments are designed on computer platforms. He believes there are issues when one translates those virtual designs to something physical, like a piece of slate or a granite memorial. “The computer is totally and utterly disassociated with the history of material culture,” he says.

This chasm between the virtual and the physical, coupled with the exponential growth of the Information Age and AI, led him to explore conceptual art.

“I’ve chosen to use the skills of stone carving as a means of highlighting the disjunction between our relationship with the physical world and our ever-growing desire to live in the digital realm,” he wrote in the introductory panel to a solo show of his conceptual art in Newport in 2023. “All of the work I’m making is symbolic of how complex our human lives have become. One could say that it is a record of where we stand in the midst of tremendous technological and scientific advances, and how that inevitably leads to existential questions.”

Benson’s conceptual art—beautifully crafted calligraphic interpretations of computer code—often begins with a computer producing content in just a nanosecond. He then spends hundreds of hours carefully carving that content by hand. His most recent project, AI Warning, was born out of a conversation he started with an AI platform. He asked the program to show him the image that it will use to “ward off” humans if it eventually separates itself from humanity.

The program generated a series of concentric circles with broken lines and other intricate graphic elements, which he is now carving in stone. For Benson, the piece is meant to ask pointed questions about the complexity of AI evolution. It has been met with a variety of responses. One person with a purely positive outlook on AI asked him, “Why on earth would you stand in the way and question that?” Others have viewed his conceptual work as a powerful artistic statement of how symbolic algorithms can be.

Carving something in stone speaks to the “lineage of material culture throughout humanity,” Benson explains. The beauty of his work is not specifically in the block of text on a piece of slate but in the slight imperfections, the minute variations in letters, and the crisp edges that only a human could produce. Those details are the embodiment of decades of superb craftsmanship in The Johns Stevens Shop.

Benson’s letters evoke the solidity and expertise that can be observed in his lettering for the National World War II Memorial. They reflect the power of voice through the inspiring inscriptions on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. Carving something in stone is the most material way humans have known to express their thoughts so permanently. Benson believes this craftsmanship and the value of his skill is tied to the lineage of humankind.

Many young artisans coming up in the building crafts have expressed the same passion for the humanity of the handmade. For stone carving student Tatum Connor, the deeply human act of making plays an important role in her craft.

“I think it’s so important that humans create beautiful things for other humans to enjoy,” she says. “It’s an expression of our human nature. It’s something that connects all of us together.”

While Connor was initially studying computer science in school, she realized that she did not want to be behind a computer all day. She discovered the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) in the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, and from there fell in love with stone carving. 

“It’s definitely the most beautiful trade,” she says.

Students at ACBA don’t reach for a computer mouse at the start of class. Instead, they begin with a drafting pencil, pair of calipers, or hand saw. They arrive at the beginning of the day not to a crowded lecture hall but a workshop to greet their professor—a trusted master of the trade. Students leave the college with a bachelor’s degree in the liberal arts and a specialty trade developed over their four years of hands-on training.

Throughout the Folklife Festival, I spent quite a bit of time with folks from ACBA. Connor and her professor, master carver Joseph Kincannon, along with students and professors in the fields of architectural carpentry and classical architecture, demonstrated the techniques, tools, and traditions of their trades and discussed the learning process. I was able to observe a sense of purpose in their work ethic and a sense of pride and satisfaction that the students share with their professors.

It’s the same pride that Benson feels as he carves a great letter “R.”

As students crave a profession that provides a fulfilling, creative, and dynamic work environment, the building arts call out from the past—with hints scattered in beautifully crafted ironwork gates, intricately carved letters in monuments, and expertly restored facades—warmly greeting the next generation of artisans with a rewarding direction.

Behind every acanthus leaf and column capital, there is the hand of a craftsperson whose name might be long forgotten but whose work is revered still centuries later. To be an artisan in the building arts is to submit to the whole, to understand the paradox of how significant and insignificant their role is. To be a craftsperson is to recognize humanity in its truest form. A rising momentum to restore historic structures and maintain buildings that hold a sense of character and history in their walls calls for workers to actualize those projects. These historic buildings have stood the test of time and have witnessed more than any two eyes on earth, standing as symbols of how community is essential to how we define our humanity.

The unique quality of the culture of a place is spoken through the craftsperson’s hand, in the individual character of its architecture—something AI could never generate.

Mary Bridget Jones is a program intern at the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival and a rising fourth-year architecture and historic preservation student at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

The Next Generation Artisans in the Traditional Building Trades program received generous support from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the 1772 Foundation, and the Richard Hampton Jenrette Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee and the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. This program received Federal support from the American Women’s History Initiative Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. In-kind support was provided by the National Park Service Historic Preservation Training Center.