Minor MOnuments

Candice Russell, Sebastian Martorana, Louis Sarowsky, Stephen Shaheen, Paul Tucci

sEPTEMBER 4 - October 17, 2026

Red Giant is pleased to present Minor Monuments, a group exhibition of new work by five sculptors working in stone: Candice Russell, Sebastian Martorana, Louis Sarowsky, Stephen Shaheen, and Paul Tucci. The exhibition takes up the oldest promise of the material, permanence, and asks what happens when it is offered to subjects the monument has always left out.

Stone is the material we reach for when we want to insist that something will not be forgotten: the founder on his plinth, the general on his horse, the name cut into the face of the tomb. Marble and its relatives carry that history into any room they enter, and the hierarchy that comes with it. Some subjects have long been thought worthy of the permanent, and most have not. A monument is, among other things, a decision about what deserves to last, and for most of the history of carved stone that decision has run in one direction: toward power, piety, and death.

Minor Monuments gathers artists who accept the full weight of the material and aim it somewhere else. In their hands marble is granted to a pillow, a snack, a childhood puppet, a doubt, a body that will not compose itself into an ideal. A dozen donuts are carved in stone and boxed by the dozen. Onyx is hung from a length of found chain. The classical vocabulary of the nude and the allegory is invoked and then allowed to sag, sprout, and misbehave. What unites the work is not a subject but a gesture: the deliberate spending of many hundred hours, and several hundred million years of geological time, on things a monument would never stoop to commemorate.

To render a toaster pastry or a television friendship in marble is a joke that takes itself seriously, an argument that the fleeting and the ordinary have as much claim to permanence as any battle or founder. The gesture is not a rejection of the monumental tradition so much as a quarrel with its guest list. It proposes that the tradition was never wrong about the power of stone, only selective about who and what got to receive it.

There is a local logic to this too. Baltimore is a city built partly of marble, its rowhome stoops cut from the same regional stone once shipped out for statehouses and cathedrals, scrubbed by hand on Saturday mornings as a matter of ordinary pride. Domestic, humble, monumental stone is native ground here.

Artist Bios

Sebastian Martorana is an artist based in Baltimore, Maryland. Sebastian received his BFA in illustration from Syracuse University. He spent a semester at the university’s Florence campus, after which he became an apprentice in a stone shop near Washington, DC. 

Sebastian came to Baltimore to earn an MFA from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he remains an adjunct faculty member. Much of the material used for his sculptures is architectural salvage from discarded bits of the city’s historic residences and institutions. 

Today, Sebastian’s studio is part of the Hilgartner Natural Stone Company, the country’s oldest continually operational stone fabrication shop. Sebastian manages and executes a wide variety of projects involving all aspects of stonework, including project design, management, fabrication,  installation, restoration, ornamental and typographical carving. From here Sebastian also undertakes his own commissioned and un-commission sculptural works.

His sculptures have been exhibited from Maine to Miami and Washington, DC to California. They include numerous public spaces and private collections. Projects include work for the United States Senate, the National Basilica in Baltimore, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, the Eisenhower Memorial in DC and the United States Federal Reserve. Sebastian was one of five artisans selected by the late Anthony Bourdain to be featured in The Balvenie Rare Craft Collection tour.

Among other exhibitions, his work was featured in the Renwick Gallery’s show 40 under 40: Craft Futures, and is now in the museum’s permanent collection. His work has also been collected by the Academy Art Museum, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and Johns Hopkins University.

Candice Russell, born 1987, Dallas, TX. Began an apprenticeship at age 19 in the studio of George Sellers, an artist trained in Florence, Italy. In 2009 she began working in architectural sculpture in NYC and opened her studio practicing ornamental sculpture before earning an MFA in sculpture at The New York Academy of Art in 2024, where she received the Carrara Residency in 2023 and 2024, The Newington Cropsey Fellowship at Greg Wyatt’s Studio, The Patron’s Award for Scholarship, and the Academy’s Sculpture Scholar Award and was ceramic sculptor in Residence at Buffalo Creek Art Center in 2024. 

Louis Sarowsky represents a new generation of self-taught artists one that is less concerned with tradition than with following instinct. Fearless in both ambition and execution, these artists don't wait for permission or formal training before pursuing difficult ideas. They simply begin, learning through persistence, curiosity, and making.

Granite is among the most demanding materials a sculptor can work with, requiring patience, precision, and an immense amount of physical labor. Yet after only a few years of carving stone, Louis has developed a visual language that feels distinctly his own. Rather than looking backward, his sculptures draw from the culture and experiences that shaped him, transforming personal history into enduring works that feel both immediate and timeless.

Many already know Louis as "Lurker Lou," whose skateboarding and unmistakable personality have always existed on his own terms. That same independent spirit carries into his sculpture, where intuition, craftsmanship, and lived experience come together in a way that feels honest and original.

Stephen Shaheen is a Brooklyn-based sculptor and interdisciplinary artist. His practice explores memory, fragility, and the ways personal, cultural, and geological histories are carried by and overlap in material remains. Trained in Siena, Italy, through a rigorous stone-carving program rooted in traditional apprenticeship methods, Shaheen approaches stone not as an emblem of monumentality or permanence, but as a marker of erosion, transience, and loss. Stone and photography form parallel systems in his work: stone as a record of deep time and human intervention, and photographs as fragile carriers of lived memory. Their combination blurs distinctions between memoir, architecture, and archaeology.

Shaheen’s work has been exhibited internationally and reviewed in Sculpture Magazine. He directs an annual residency in Carrara, Italy, and maintains studios in New York and Connecticut.

Paul Tucci’s sculptural practice in wood and stone blends a graphic street-art influence with an intuitive carving process. Guided by the organic origins of his materials, Tucci responds to the distinct grain and texture of each element, allowing bold lines and raw energy to direct the form naturally.