Madison’s expanding Quarra Stone sculpts art, history and culture

Business and local economy reporter

Business and local economy reporter

Quarra Stone Company senior director of operations Alex Marshall and plant manager Lincoln Durham brush up Martin Foot's sculpture of Faisal Abdu'Allah.

At an inconspicuous workshop just off Stoughton Road, five dozen workers at a Madison stone company transform hunks of stone into museum-ready fine art and major historical monuments.

It's just one part of the work that Quarra Stone Company has spent more than 30 years perfecting. Using a combination of new and centuries-old techniques, the company has supplied stone work for everything from college campuses to the U.S. Capitol.

Growing from six workers at its founding in 1989 to 65 today, the company is now preparing to grow further. Next summer, Quarra will move from its original 6-acre site to a 25-acre stretch of former cornfield in Sun Prairie, where construction for a $19 million project is currently underway. The move will double Quarra's production capacity and add another two dozen workers over the next two years.

Years-long projects

Quarra Stone was founded by Jim Durham, previously a co-owner of Madison Block & Stone. In one of its first major projects, Quarra milled about two acres of stone for Grainger Hall, the home of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's business school. Since then, the company has worked on around 1,500 projects, Durham said, with nearly 50 currently under contract.

Those projects can take years. Renovating and restoring the stone work at the Kansas State Capitol, one of Quarra's nine statehouse projects, was a five-year endeavor. So too was the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, one of the company's most high-profile projects. From 2003 to 2008, the company created columns, staircases, walls and doorways for the 600,000-square-foot addition beneath the nation's capitol.

Jim Durham, founder and president of Quarra Stone Company, poses for a photo on the production floor.

Quarra has worked on museums and monuments near and far, including UW-Madison's Chazen Museum of Art and Memphis’ I AM A MAN Plaza, which commemorates the city's 1968 sanitation workers’ strike and the role it played in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Currently, the company is working with architect Maya Lin to fabricate a sculpture for the Obama Presidential Center. It's also working on components of a Mormon temple in Orem, Utah, the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Boston, and a memorial to the nine Black Americans murdered by a white supremacist at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

To Durham, projects like those take the company's work far beyond stone carving.

"If you work here, you're working on stuff that is part of the current contemporary dialogue of what's happening in our society," Durham said.

After working on the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, Quarra was hired by the state's governor to remove 20 statues related to the Confederacy or other controversial issues.

"It's our privilege to be part of this public dialogue of contemporary history," Durham said.

At Quarra Stone Company's east side facility, a massive block saw cuts a slab from a block of wisp granite for a Milwaukee project.

Into the art world

In its first 20 years, Quarra proved that it could "do really big jobs" featuring complex architectural carving and "the most complex geometry for buildings," Durham said.

But after years of specializing in architectural work — providing stone work for floors, walls and facades — the company added a new kind of client: artists.

Fine artists, often funded by galleries or collectors, contact Quarra for help executing major projects involving stone. They send drawings, digital files or objects for Quarra to scan with its 3D scanners. From there, the company can provide not only stone, but the massive equipment, specialized tools and trained craftsmen needed to shape that stone according to the artist's vision.

"In some sense, we’re the hands of the artist," Durham said. "What we’re trying to do is make it easier and easier for the artist to direct us, and for the artist to know what's possible."

Artists have long utilized helpers. Some, like Andy Warhol, have created large-scale studios where other artists create work in their signature style. Durham said many people don't realize that sort of collaboration happens, imagining instead that all artists single handedly bring their ideas to life.

"Almost everyone thinks that," Durham said.

Several pieces fabricated in Quarra's workshop are now on display in museums or galleries. That includes "Jeff," a larger-than-life statue created from a 3D scan artist Charles Ray took of a man he met outside a Los Angeles heroin rehab clinic. The scan was so exact that it picked up the lettering on the model's shirt.

The final version, which would stand about nine feet tall if he rose from his seat, was shipped to the Bourse de Commerce museum in Paris.

The first draft of the statue sits in the company's workshop. Though shockingly lifelike, it was rejected by the artist because one leg was slightly larger than the other.

Another Charles Ray piece, "2 Horses," is a 10-foot by 16-foot relief carving of two horses in profile, which required one of Quarra's handful of computer numerical control (CNC) machines to work round the clock for months. After showing in Paris, the piece is now part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The company is working on a new edition of that same piece. According to Durham, it matches the artist's model within two-tenths of a millimeter.

Workers at Quarra Stone Company apply a point-chiseled texture to a stone landscape feature bench.

"I think it's fair to say that ... nowhere else in the world would you see that work being done," Durham said.

"It's high stakes and requires a lot of technical know-how," said plant manager Lincoln Durham, who first began working in his father's plant during high school summers nearly two decades ago. Sometimes, he said, the company works on individual blocks of stone that cost $100,000 or more. "If you commit a single error ... you have to buy a new piece."

The company takes on mixed media projects that many other stone companies wouldn't. Staff worked with artist Sarah Sze on a series of projects that involved drilling hundreds of thousands of holes into the smooth, split faces of massive boulders. The company then filled each with epoxy in one of more than a hundred colors to create pixelated, sunset-like images from photographs Sze chose.

"Stone fabricators usually don't like to do this type of thing, and we do. We're open to exploration," said project manager America Cely.

Madison artist and UW-Madison professor of printmaking Faisal Abdu'Allah is pictured with the new sculpture of himself at Quarra Stone Company in Madison.

Old meets new

At Quarra's current facility, workers use high-tech tools just yards away from others using some of the industry's most time-worn techniques.

"You've got robots of the 21st century milling crazy stuff, and on the other end, we're using techniques that are 10,000 years old," Lincoln Durham said, standing between towering machines that saw, chisel and polish slabs that weigh tons. Among those ancient approaches is feather wedging, a process of splitting a large stone by drilling a series of holes and then hammering wedges into those holes.

In 2004, the company bought its first robot, a milling device whose arm can move around a stone on seven axes. Today it has two robots, with a third planned for the new facility.

Old or new, the machines all use shimmering, diamond-encrusted blades to cut through such hard material. Many continuously spray water over the stone to control the dust that would otherwise fill the work area.

"Everything is cut with diamonds and water, basically," Lincoln Durham said.

Quarra Stone Company machine operator Peter Vaughan sets up a milling program for a fine art project on one of the company's large computer numerical control (CNC) machines.

Just off the main production floor is a set of offices and work areas called the Qlab, home to the company's robots and the people who operate them. On one wall hang a dozen or so diplomas from lab staff, who hold architecture degrees from prestigious universities with advanced fabrication laboratories.

About five years ago, the company spent about $500,000 to add to its technology arsenal. The investments included a set of advanced 3D scanners, one of which cost around $150,000.

Scanners are more common in the aerospace industry, said Brian Smith, director of robotics and design engineering. A difference of less than a millimeter matters when you’re sending a rocket to space.

"Some of the fine art work requires us to take things to a level of accuracy that normally you don't see in stone," Smith said

Meanwhile, Quarra is also devoting new attention to ancient techniques. A few years ago, the company began sending staff to Italy to learn hand carving from renowned sculptor Martin Foot. Those skills, Jim Durham said, will complement the high-tech methods the company has already developed.

Texture was created by robotic stone cutters during the making of Martin Foot's sculpture of Faisal Abdu'Allah at Quarra Stone Company in Madison.

"I think we can do the best work in the world by machine, and we need to be able to do the best sculpting and carving by hand and by traditional means," he said. "We have to be good in the old way and the new way."

Last year, the company demonstrated that growing strength by working on a self-portrait sculpture designed by UW-Madison art professor Faisal Abdu’Allah. Though some of the initial work was done by machines, the final carving was done by Foot.

Building that new expertise will take a while, but Durham thinks the company is improving daily.

"Ten years from now, we’ll be at a whole different level. We're at a really nice level right now, but we will get better."

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At a Tuesday talk, Greg Hoffman told local companies to develop more "human" brands and convince customers they’re buying more than the product itself.

At a Tuesday talk, Greg Hoffman told local companies to develop more "human" brands and convince customers they’re buying more than the product itself.

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