Students, faculty, staff and the community gathered to witness the unveiling of the multistory glass torch sculpture, a centerpiece within the newly completed Student Union on Tuesday evening.
The sculpture, designed to resemble the torch light that the Torchbearer raises before him, was kept a secret until the reveal this evening. It was suspended over the university seal where the two main hallways of the Student Union intersect.
Vince Carilli, vice chancellor for student life, began the ceremony welcoming the crowd to the Student Union and reminisced about the University Center (UC), built in 1952, which gave way to the new building.
“The UC meant so much to so many, that the seal you see on the front steps of the building was brought over from that project to bring the old into the new,” Carilli said. “The UC provided our campus with a lot of great memories over the years and I believe that our new state-of-the-art facility will create new memories for the thousands of students, faculty and staff who will occupy it for decades to come.”
The torch was created by Matthew Cummings, a local artist and owner of Pretentious Glass Co. in the Old City. Cummings was approached about creating the sculpture by Doug McCarty, president of McCarty Holsaple McCarty Architects, with whom he had just finished working on another project with for Regal’s headquarters.
After six months of meetings and plannings, Cummings finally got started on working on the sculpture. It then took even more months and months for the piece to be fabricated, with one whole day dedicated to just transfer the glass components from Pretentious Glass located five minutes away to the Student Union.
“This was so exciting to unveil this piece tonight, because we finished this back in August. We’ve been done with this for a really long time, but we haven’t been able to talk about it, so like keeping this a secret, it was one of the hardest things I’ve done this year,” Cummings said. “So it was amazing to actually show everybody and celebrate this massive piece that we made that I think is going to be truly something unique that Knoxville has.”
The piece incorporates 320 individual glass components suspended using pieces of steel and stretches a little over 30 feet in length.
At the end of the ceremony, an orange and red glow brought the torch to life as students, faculty and the community lit their own electronic candles in unison.
Dan Smith, facility services campus project manager for the Student Union, said that the ceremony for him was a reward for all the hard work that was put into the building of the facility.
“As soon as I came in the door and I could hear students talking and saw people sitting in chairs and just living in the building, it felt right,” Smith said. “So, lighting the torch for me is a culmination of, gosh I’ve been with the project since seven years, the project was going on several years before I got involved, so it is a culmination of all of that and it’s a visual representation of the energy that the students are bringing to the Student Union which is very personally rewarding to me.”
The UT community celebrates the unveiling of the glass torch sculpture in the newly completed Student Union on Jan. 8, 2018.
The ceremony, beyond being a part of the unveiling of the Student Union and the sculpture, was also a welcoming light for the new semester and a symbol representing what UT stands for.
“Personally the lighting of the torch ceremony was very symbolic about how far we’ve come as a campus and how we need to continue being unified as a campus,” Caitlin Lloyd, junior in college scholars, said. “With the speech that Maddie Stephens did, she very much touched on the fact that the torch represents how we’re all united and all individual. I especially like that, because of the notion that you can see each individual flame and everyone at UT doesn’t just make UT itself, while yes, we are all united under the University of Tennessee, we’re still individuals who contribute to our community.”
