For Jim Durham, the road to becoming one of the biggest producers of fine art stone sculptures in the world began with a summer job in college.
“One of the enjoyable things about the business: It’s indoors, it’s outdoors … it can be heavy, can be delicate, it can be crude and basic commodity-type stonework. Or it can be the most theoretical,” Durham told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”
A project is lit in the studio of Quarra Stone Company based in Sun Prairie. Photo courtesy of Quarra Stone Company
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Durham, originally from Virginia, founded a stone fabrication business called Quarra Stone Company in Madison in 1989 after a stint at a limestone quarry in Illinois. Growing from six employees to a team of more than 60 today, the company has worked on architectural projects for Wisconsin institutions like the Chazen Museum of Art and the state capitol.
The scope of the business has also grown. Quarra has worked on memorials nationwide, from a project honoring enslaved laborers in Virginia to a plaza in Memphis recognizing workers in the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike and its role in the Civil Rights Movement.
In 2022, the company broke ground on its current headquarters in Sun Prairie — a 25-acre campus totalling $19 million.
A section of the monument “I AM A MAN Plaza” stands in Memphis, Tenn. Photo courtesy of Quarra Stone Company
New tech for classic art
Durham’s foray into the world of fine art began with a love of the classics.
“I was always impressed with work of artists like Michelangelo or Bernini … where a piece might look like a veil over a face and you would think, ‘well that just looks exactly like cloth,’” Durham said. “I could touch it, and it should feel like cloth, but it’s not. It’s marble.”
Durham has updated the art of stone carving though — a form of expression dating back thousands of years — with new technology.
A robot owned and operated by Quarra Stone Company carves into stone. Photo courtesy of Quarra Stone Company
In 2004, the company acquired its first robot. The robots Quarra uses have a reach of 10 feet in every direction and include rotating tables, Durham said, allowing artists to rotate a piece of art to work on different sides of a piece of stone. The robots follow schematics called a “tool path” that tell the machine where and how fast to cut stone. Durham said most of Quarra’s projects are begun by a robot but finished by a human carver.
The company now has three robot carvers.
“There aren’t a great deal of laypeople who understand how robots work,” Durham said. “In a sense, the human is telling the robot which tool to use, how fast to move it. Robots just do what they’re told.”
Stone milling company Robotor estimates that carving a statue entirely by hand would take nearly double the number of days to complete and would cost roughly 50 percent more than using robots and finishing the project by hand.
Durham said robots have their place in creating art, even if they lack the nuance a human carver can impart.
“A lot of the artwork that’s produced with the robot has an overall whiteness … it’s almost like it’s bleached,” Durham said. “If you mill a piece of white marble with a diamond-electroplated tool, there’s a certain amount of vibration and hammering that takes place, that makes all the grains of marble read uniformly white.”
Human carvers can additionally create light and shadow, Durham continued.
Durham expands fine art effort with purchase of Italian studio
In Wisconsin, Quarra is working on projects for the Veterans Administration and fine art for a U.S.-based artist who asked that their art be made by a Quarra robot because of the smooth finish.
But their priciest work is being done on the other side of the world.
Statues are displayed at the stone carving workshop, Franco Cervietti, in Pietrasanta, Italy. Quarra Stone Company announced the purchase of the Italian workshop in April. Photo courtesy of Quarra Stone Company
In October, Durham purchased Franco Cervietti, a respected sculpture workshop studio in Italy. Durham said this shop is producing pieces that will be sold to a client for between $65 to $70 million each.
A reporter for Bloomberg wrote the purchase of a renowned Italian carving studio by an American could be seen by some Italians as comparable to Rome falling to the Goths — the decline of an empire.
Durham said he hopes to share knowledge from this Italian studio with his studio in Sun Prairie. He said he wants to preserve what the Italian studio has spent decades building and not lose that attention to detail in the art.
“When you walk by 10 times a day and you realize, ‘Oh, I connect with that piece.’ Then you say: ‘Why? What is it about it that forms this connection?’” Durham said. “I think it’s paying attention to those connections that is part of keeping our work product at a very high level.”