ABOUT ME

PELLETTIERI STONE CARVERS’ ACADEMY

I started working with Chris Pellettieri in 2016. I met him while visiting the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. He was interested in teaching a 6-week carving workshop for professional artists. During his workshop I learned to carve using the traditional methods that were passed on to him as a professional carver working in a cathedral, methods that date back centuries and are passed down from master to apprentice. I welcomed his traditional knowledge because up until that point I had mostly learned from self-taught craftsmen and modern art sculptors.

Chris remained in touch as a friend and mentor while I returned to Tenino, Washington to carve professionally as a self-employed artist. My work focused on using the local sandstone for decorative relief carvings, including public art for the city of Tenino, and private commissions in sculptural cemetery monuments, address stones and letter carvings. I also produced my own fine-art sculpture and joined the Northwest Stone Sculptors Association to connect with a network of diverse artists sculpting in stone. During one of our summer carving symposiums I suggested Chris to be invited as one of our guest artists and lecturers, introducing him and his teaching methods to over one hundred members of the NWSSA.

In 2023 Chris invited me to move to New York City and assist him in teaching stone carving to high school students. His non-profit, Pellettieri Stone Carvers’ Academy is partnered with the National Parks Service and funded in-part by the DDORA Foundation to bring stone carving education and paid summer youth employment opportunities to the students of Mather Building Arts & Craftsmanship High School. The classes we teach are held on Governors Island National Monument and provide instruction on carving limestone with mallet and chisel.

During the time I’m not teaching with his educational program, Chris allows me to share his carving studio in the Bronx and work on my own portfolio of stone work. I currently focus my work on figurative human and animal heads inspired by the architectural decoration I see on the fabulous buildings all around New York City.

THE SHED

The Shed is unlike any other cooperative art space in existence. It is a stone carving workspace and showroom located in Tenino, a former quarry town in Thurston County, Washington, 15 miles south of Olympia. Tenino’s quarries were once the site of a booming sandstone industry that supplied architectural stone throughout the United States however today that industry has disappeared and left behind a quiet rural farming town. A small group of artist and craftsmen stone carvers maintain the aging quarry and the Shed, a corrugated metal shack in the center of town where one-of-a-kind stone art is displayed, carving classes are taught using mallet and chisel and the town’s labor history is shared with visitors in a way that brings to life a forgotten past. Stepping inside the Shed is like stepping back in time.

Maybe the most unique quality of the Shed is how it is managed as a cooperative guild. When I found Keith Phillips carving there on the Saturday I first visited Tenino, I asked if I could learn to carve alongside him. I spent five years carving in the quarry and in the Shed as his apprentice, turning my artwork into merchandise to sell in the Shed and almost immediately taking commissions and advancing my self-taught carving skills. Though there are sometimes structured classes taught by the members of the guild, The Shed is an open-door art space where anyone interested can obtain access to tools and materials, and learn the disappearing craft of carving stone. They are invited to place their work on the shelves for sale with a small percentage of sales going towards the costs of maintaining the Shed. Can you imagine stepping into an artist’s studio and immediately being invited to learn their skills and to make and sell your own work alongside theirs? This kind of open-door arrangement would be unheard of in almost any other type of art or craft.

While working at the Shed I developed my carving skills by designing and carving a range of items that were popular with our visitors, from polished granite rain collectors to monogram letters, from desktop flower reliefs to green-man faces for the garden. Larger projects such as sundials, fireplace mantels or Celtic cross memorials were typically made by commission. I also taught carving classes with the assistance of the local non-profit Arbutus Folk School. I built work benches, acquired an inventory of community carving tools, painted signs to advertise our business and helped lay the ground-work for developing an official non-profit status artist guild. Although our unique business brought the attention of local magazines and news media and visitors steadily rolled in from Seattle and Olympia, our business was difficult to sustain. The winters were cold in an unheated Shed and visitors dropped off for half the year. I took night classes to learn small business management, although my instructors were unfamiliar with how to structure a cooperative guild. I wrote for numerous artist and historic preservation grants and was all-to-often denied because we didn’t have a lease on our building or an official non-profit status, or that our collective wasn’t seen as producing high-end art in the familiar way. So we mostly maintained our business through our sales during profitable times, and from our own pockets during hard times.

The Shed and the Tenino Stone Carvers Guild still operate today. Although I have moved on from Tenino, I still periodically showcase my work there. The active members of the guild grow and shrink, always changing over time. I am still intensively proud of the work I’ve contributed to make the Shed a totally unique art space and a living example of cooperative artists and craftsmen carrying the torch of traditional carving forward for future generations. If you live in or are traveling to western Washington in Pacific Northwest, find time to visit the Tenino Stone Carvers Guild and, if you’re lucky, find the open doors of the Shed, where a very unique lost art is on display and very much alive.

For more information on the Tenino Stone Carvers, visit www.teninostonecarvers.org or on facebook.

PANCHO