Who was the sculptor who directed the carving of Mount Rushmore?

Gutzon Borglum was the sculptor who directed the carving of Mount Rushmore.

Borglum supervised the project from 1927 until his death in 1941, while his son Lincoln Borglum helped oversee the later work. About 400 workers carved the 60-foot-high heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln into the granite of South Dakota's Black Hills.

The memorial was intended to represent the first 150 years of U.S. history. Borglum selected presidents associated with the nation's founding, territorial expansion, economic development, and preservation of the Union. The project used dynamite for most of the excavation, followed by drilling and hand finishing. Approximately 450,000 tons of rock were removed.

The original plan included a larger sculpture extending below the heads, but funding and Borglum's death prevented completion. The memorial's location is also connected to contested Indigenous history: the Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota, and the United States acquired them after violating the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.