Our story began with a simple email from Ford to the Frank Bolton Sign Company requesting a “site marker” that would give BlueOval City an identity as bold as its mission to build the next generation of electric vehicles.

Then during one of our first meetings, one of our former University of Memphis graduate students raised her hand and asked, “What if we made this a teaching moment? What if Ford invited the University of Memphis to design it with their students?”

Ford shared that vision, said yes, and just like that, our students became something many people like them work their whole lives to achieve: working artists. We built an entire course around the project.

We recruited six students – three from graphic design, three from sculpture – who were willing to step outside their comfort zones and put their faith in an experimental process.

Their first assignment was not welding or 3-D modeling; it was listening. They drove to BlueOval City, walked the fields where this amazing site now resides, and talked with the mayor of Stanton, cannery workers, and life-long residents who were eager to understand what Ford’s impact on this community would really be.

The students learned, before they ever sketched a line, that public art is public service: You have to understand the people who will live with the work every day.

Back in Memphis, the real brainstorming began. They studied industrial gateways of the past – Chicago’s stockyards, Ford’s own Rouge site – and juxtaposed them with hallmarks of an eco-friendly future: clean lines, recycled metals, light, and transparency.

In rapid-fire charrettes, we asked the class for 20 concepts before lunch. They came back with 40.

One looked like a suspension bridge, another like a circuit board, and one, drawn in the margin of a notebook, resembled a cluster of sprouting leaves. It might have only been a doodle at the time, but it became their North Star.

Over the next eight weeks, we turned those “leaves” into what you see in the sculpture: six soaring canopies, each perforated with a vocabulary of symbols developed by one of our post-graduates, Emily Balton. Many of those symbols borrow from the culture and heritage of West Tennessee – the musical glyphs of Beale Street, the quilt-like grid of cotton fields, the arch of the Mississippi River Bridge, arrows that echo both water cycles and assembly-line motion.

They are painted in Ford’s own palette, marrying brand identity with regional pride. And if you stand beneath the lowest canopy, you will see sun and shadow dance across the pavement the way soybeans ripple in a Delta breeze.

Design, however, is only half the story. Youngblood Studio took our compound curves and asked, “How do we bend quarter-inch steel into something that feels alive?”

Their team invented new rolling jigs, welded through the night, blasted, primed, and finished each piece in the same kind of industrial paint used on Ford vehicles. And along the way, the Frank Balton Sign Company added their expertise to the fabrication and installation process.

Every decision – down to the LED wash lights you will see after dusk – was a collaboration between the students, professional fabricators, and Ford’s landscape architects. That is teamwork at its best: no one voice loudest, every voice essential.

So what does this sculpture mean? First, it is a beacon of growth – literal and symbolic. BlueOval City is Ford’s largest investment in the United States in generations, and it honors the county that welcomed that investment.

Second, it is a promise. These trunks and canopies say that advanced manufacturing and environmental stewardship can – and must – rise together.

Third, it is proof that when a company trusts local talent, the possibilities are endless. Our students are graduating with a line on their résumé most artists wait decades to earn, and Ford gains a landmark that could only have come from the soil, culture, and imagination of West Tennessee.

My hope is that it reminds every visitor that innovation grows best when its roots belong to the community. – by Kelsey Harrison

(PHOTO: New sculpture at BlueOval City)