Mount Rushmore
— — four faces, half a mountain, full afternoon light.
Not only on a wall.
“The carved granite faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, each about 60 feet tall, looking southeast from a Black Hills cliff face. Gutzon Borglum led the work from 1927 to 1941; his son Lincoln Borglum finished it after his father's death. The studio's tile carries the warm pink of the granite under afternoon light and the conifers below the talus.
Mount Rushmore, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mount Rushmore National Memorial sits in the Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota, about 35 kilometres southwest of Rapid City, at roughly 1,745 metres elevation on the southeast face of a granite peak. The carving (heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt) was conceived by Doane Robinson and executed by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and roughly 400 workers between October 1927 and October 1941. The memorial is administered by the National Park Service and draws about two million visitors a year.
The mountain is a coarse-grained Harney Peak granite, intruded as molten rock about 1.6 billion years ago and exposed by erosion over the last 70 million. Borglum chose this face because its grain was uniform enough to hold detail and its orientation caught morning and afternoon sun. Roughly 450,000 tonnes of rock were removed, most of it by controlled dynamite charges, then finished with jackhammers and hand chisels. The carved surface is touched up by Park Service crews roughly every other year.
The faces look slightly east of south, so the morning light catches them directly and the relief reads sharpest between sunrise and about 10 a.m. Afternoon light warms the granite to a soft pink and lengthens the shadows under each brow. The amphitheater holds a lighting ceremony nightly from late May through September, in which the faces are slowly illuminated after dark. The memorial grounds remain open year-round; the visitor center and the Sculptor's Studio follow seasonal hours posted by the National Park Service.