Stone Arts School

The Stone Arts School is committed to creating an exciting environment where sculptors from around the world can explore traditional and modern stone carving techniques with working professionals, while promoting granite as a vital material for artistic expression.

In the spring of 2007 The Vermont Granite Museum and Stone Arts School began arranging a series of workshops the Stone Arts School (SAS) at their historic Jones Brothers facility. SAS  tapped the deep reservoir of talents, materials and capabilities of Barre’s century-old granite industry to provide sculptors and associated arts and building professionals with hands-on instruction by many of the area’s most accomplished working sculptors and stone workers, in the vanishing art of granite sculpture and its related disciplines.

Our most recent workshop was held in the summer of 2012 for National Parks Service Historic Preservation Program.  The NPS is given the responsibility to maintain and restore all our national monuments and treasures.  Our workshop was a combination of classroom and hands on training.  We taught many aspects of monument repair from stone identification, stone setting, tool mark identification, tools and surface matching and repairs, field lettering and more.  It included tours to many of our manufacturing facilities.  All this will help these stewards of our national treasure in damage assessment, proper identification and damage reporting, field management of repairs, and how to manage packing of shipping of parts that may have to be repaired off site.

We are developing workshops for beginners, intermediate and advanced sculptors, which will  explore traditional and modern techniques of working with granite as a sculptural medium, as well as its functional application in landscape and architecture. The course offerings will include many inter-related subjects and preparatory sessions. Currently without a regular curriculum, we will costume fit, by making special arrangements with individual area sculptors, the courses you need.

Our unique access to industry resources, highly skilled resident sculptors and related arts professionals, combined with our long celebrated history in the stone trades, distinguishes us among similar programs in the U.S. Our sculptors will be encouraged to use their own commissioned work for case studies and demonstrations, affording participants rare insights into the world of the professional granite sculptor.

The Stone Arts School promises to educate, inspire and encourage a new generation of stone arts professionals that are equipped with the necessary skills to create and innovate with one of our most challenging natural materials.