Stone is the only building material that was already old when the first person picked it up. Richard Rhodes has spent a working life with it, as a sculptor, as a stonemason with his hands actually on it, and as a historian of what it has meant to the people who raised it, and this show is the three of those in one place.
Opening Reception
Friday, June 12
5:00pm
Learn more about Richard Rhodes
Timeless Form: Stone as Story presents a selection of photographs from Richard Rhodes’ exploration of stone as both material and cultural record. Drawn from his book, Stone: Ancient Craft to Modern Mastery (2025), the images trace humanity’s enduring relationship with one of its oldest building materials — from ancient pavements and sacred sites to masterful examples of masonry and construction.
Rhodes approaches stone not only as a sculptor and stonemason, but as a historian of form, structure, and memory. Influenced by his apprenticeship in Siena, Italy, and his study of the sacred geometries preserved through the medieval Freemasons’ guild, Rhodes documents the ways stone has shaped civic life, ritual, permanence, and artistic expression across centuries.
Limited, signed editions of the book will be available.
In the collection’s words
An apprenticeship in Siena and a study of medieval Freemason geometry are not the usual credentials for a photographer, and that is exactly why these images look the way they do. Rhodes photographs a wall the way a mason reads it, which is to say he can see the decision the man made in the eleventh century and he shows you where it is.
Santa Fe is a town built out of earth rather than stone, so this material arrives here as a genuine outsider. It is worth walking up the stairs to look at it that way.
Continue exploring
- Richard Rhodes and his stone work at CCA in The Dispatch
- Carrier Wave, with Randy L. Barton and Cloudface
- The antiquities collection, where the same argument about permanence is made in clay and wool
- The adobe language of Santa Fe
- All exhibitions at Webster Collection
