On the Rock presents a series of fifteen interviews in which master marble carvers from the Acropolis restoration project discuss their ancient craft within their contemporary context, exploring their training and the specifics of their work, as well as how the Greek economic crisis has affected the ongoing restoration and their personal lives. It is an interdisciplinary book, bringing together ancient building practices, the teaching of traditional craft, changes in the practice of architectural restoration, the social and class dynamics within the restoration site, and the personal histories of the most skilled marble carvers working today. The interviews, conducted by artist Allyson Vieira, are presented as monologues in a style reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s Working.
Artist Allyson Vieira lives and works in New York. She is currently Assistant Professor of Foundations at the Corcoran School of Art at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.. She has exhibited extensively both internationally and in the U.S., and her first major catalog, Allyson Vieira: The Plural Present, was published by Karma Books in 2016.
Jarrett Earnest is an artist and writer living in New York City. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018), editor of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2017 by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams, June 2019) and curator of "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner, NY (February 21 - April 13, 2019).
Brooke Holmes teaches at Princeton as a comparatist and classicist. Her most recent project was Liquid Antiquity (2017) with the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, a multi-authored book and video installation designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfo and exhibited in Athens and London. A 2018-2019 Guggenheim Fellow, she’s currently finishing a book entitled The Tissue of the World: Sympathy and the Concept of Nature in Greco-Roman Antiquity as a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
