Meet Nicholas Benson, The Man Behind The Forthcoming Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial

Nicholas Benson, a stone-carver and MacArthur Grant honoree, stopped by PBS NewsHour to discuss his craft. And at an ideal time, too. Why? Well, in keeping with today’s emphasis on remembering the past in order to create a more positive future, Benson’s current project happens to be The Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C.

As Benson describes it, stone carving is an extremely difficult, labor intensive artistic endeavor to undertake.

Our favorite part of Benson’s interview occurs when host Jeffrey Brown asks him, well, what’s all this effort for, exactly? Why not just use power tools? Benson answered thusly:

I try and use I use an analogy about oriental rugs. I say, you know, when you go and you look at a machine woven rug it has absolutely no life to it at all. And when you see a hand-knotted rug there is all of the inconsistency and all that beautiful intrinsic value from the hand that’s immediately obvious. And I think that holds true for what we do, you know. Everything about the effort of just the two hands making these things and producing these objects without a machine involved at all, so many people can understand that, you know.

Take a look at the interview, via PBS News Hour, for yourselves.

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