Mark Mendel was born in 1947 in Monroe, Ga., to father Julian Mendel and mother Eleanor Simon. His southern childhood carved grooves in his mind that he would retrace throughout his life. The violent racism he witnessed drove his commitment to racial justice. The death of his father at age nine truncated his experience of that role; as a father himself, he strove with love towards his own ideals and honed the ability to boast about his three kids with or without reason.
A stonemason since 1970, Mark built scores of walls, arches, terraces, and walks and hundreds of fireplaces in both brick and stone. His masonry work exists mostly in the Berkshires, where he founded and ran Monterey Masonry (1982 to 2024) as well as in Minnesota, Rhode Island, Seattle, Virginia, and other places where he was recruited for special projects and historic restorations.
Like his medium of stone, Mark was known to be difficult to work with. Nevertheless, he was deeply respected by stonemasons, architects, designers, clients, and by the dozens of young people he trained and mentored. His son Julian carries on his legacy at Maple Hill Masonry.
Mark expected his masons to be artists. He insisted his employees read literature, study architecture, internalize jazz, and learn the history and context of their craft. Stonemasons built the Duomo, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Guido’s wall. Mark said:
I built my first stone wall in 1969. And I’m still working every day with stone, primarily New England fieldstone. There is a distinct smell of fieldstone as you work it with a hammer and a chisel. There is the earthy fragrance of the dirt and lichen on the surface of the stone, and when the stone splits an astringent mineral perfume is released from its million years of confinement. Stonemasons know this smell.
And the sounds. The chip-chip-chip chirps of the hammer and the point, the cell door slam crack of the bull set, the resonating ring of a high quality chisel. These sounds continue through the daylight hours until the wall reaches its completion, and, along with their lunch boxes and tools, the voices of the masons disappear and only an old mason like myself remembers them.
Mark was a person who had heroes, many of whom he somehow managed to meet. If you knew Mark, you knew he shook Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s hand at an airport in Georgia. You knew he had built a stone wall for Yo-Yo Ma, his preferred player of Bach. Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Stacy Abrams, Bernie Sanders, Martin Puryear, Thomas Tranströmer, Zen Master Seung Sahn, Cynthia Atwood—the list goes on. He revered people who, with whatever medium, articulated truth and did not compromise.
Mark was adamantly opposed to many things: chewing gum, Dollar General moving into Sheffield, herd mentality, the Yankees, Jenny Holzer’s art. He was known for regularly sending mass emails on these topics.
While he prided himself as blue collar, he could not resist boasting about his more elite connections, notably his tenure as a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) from 1976 to 1982. During this period Mark developed his outdoor presentations of poems in many media, which he called “Environmental Poetry.” His work was shown nationally and internationally in group and one-man shows, including Franklin Furnace and the Alternative Museum; the Walker Arts Center; Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria’ and the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. He was a pioneer in what became known as public art in the late 1980s.
Of the poems he sprayed on brick walls, painted on barns, carved into marble, bagged in plastic, lit up on neon signs, or flew behind planes, he said:
Rather than write a poem about the environment, I have begun to create an environment of poetry or at least one which includes it as it includes other public writing. Poetry predates writing and printing. The recent tradition of poetics as a possession of the educated elite grew from its confinement to the printed page; I want [my poems] to fit the viaduct as a sonnet was once felt to fit the page.
Mark was proud of his education at Johns Hopkins and MIT and of being an instructor at the Haystack Mountain School of Arts and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but he was prouder still of his apprenticeships with stonemasons in Maine in the 1970s and his work teaching poetry in prisons, public schools, and community colleges.
Mark practiced Zen Buddhism and founded a meditation group in the Berkshires. He championed the koan “only don’t know.” His cellphone ringtone was a barking dog.
Mark left this world surrounded by the true love of his children, Julian Mendel, Bridget Mendel, and Grace Mendel; his son-in-law Mark Borrello; his granddaughter Idouna Grace Lee, and his love Cynthia Atwood. A private memorial will be held in February.
