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A Florentine marble masterwork. A nine-foot sand-printed sculpture built by Â鶹¾«Ñ¡students and faculty. An exhibition at Ellis Island. This is the story of how a Â鶹¾«Ñ¡research team, working across continents and disciplines, gave America a new way to see one of its most iconic symbols and gave our students a project few universities would ever attempt.

Interdisciplinary by Design

For over a century, people have noticed that Florence's Liberty of Poetry, sculpted by Pio Fedi in 1883, looks strikingly like New York's Statue of Liberty, unveiled just three years later. Both wear a spiked crown, both raise an arm over broken chains, both personify Libertas. Whether Bartholdi ever saw Fedi's work has never been proven. An interdisciplinary team from Â鶹¾«Ñ¡, led by Josh Talbott (Information Technology Director in the College of Sciences and Humanities) set out to explore that question the only way that made sense: by bringing the two statues face to face for the first time.

The team drew on faculty and students from the College of Sciences and Humanities, the College of Aeronautics and Engineering, the College of the Arts, and the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, along with the Wick Poetry Center. The university invested in the space between disciplines and was willing to champion this ambitious project.

That investment paid off. The project became one of the milestones that helped carry Â鶹¾«Ñ¡toward its R1 research designation, further proving that our faculty and students can compete, and lead, on an international stage.

From Florence to a Youngstown Shop Floor

First, a Â鶹¾«Ñ¡research team traveled to the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence to digitally capture Fedi's Liberty of Poetry with a handheld 3D scanner, building the full figure from more than a hundred individual scans. Getting that close to a protected Italian national treasure took a notary, an Italian tax ID, and clearances that reportedly reached the Vatican.

Back home, that scan data became the foundation for months of hands-on, cross-college work:

• Digital sculpting to clean and align the scan into a single printable mesh
• CAD reconstruction and aluminum casting of the statue's crown, engineered and cast with faculty and students in the College of Aeronautics and Engineering
• Rhino modeling of the exhibit cases by architecture faculty, so the entire show could be approved before a single piece was printed
• Binder-jet 3D printing, in partnership with Ohio-based Freshmade 3D and Humtown Products, to grow a nine-foot, 80-percent-scale figure out of sand and adhesive — with the weight, grain, and presence of real marble
• Student fabrication, from welding the crown to engineering a steel stand built to outlast the statue itself

Through this project, Â鶹¾«Ñ¡students gained hands-on experience in digital scanning, CAD, casting, fabrication, and exhibition design that most undergraduates never get near.

Liberty, on Ellis Island

In late 2019, the finished work traveled to the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration as the centerpiece of Sisters in Liberty: From Florence, Italy to New York, New York — a collaboration between Â鶹¾«Ñ¡and the Opera di Santa Croce. Steps from where millions of immigrants once caught their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, Kent State's reconstruction held the far end of the exhibit hall, exactly as our team's scale models predicted, alongside a poetry experience built with the Wick Poetry Center.

The exhibition earned national coverage, including a , and a nomination for Best International Exhibit — a rare level of visibility for a university-led humanities and fabrication project. It closed earlier than planned in 2020 as the world shut down for COVID-19, a quiet ending for a project about a very public idea. But the questions it raised about liberty, who gets to picture it and what a university can build when its colleges work as one are still very much open.

Why This Matters for Kent State

Sisters in Liberty is what happens when a university treats itself as a place where big, unlikely ideas get made real. It's a story about:

• Student opportunity: undergraduate and graduate students working with real cultural artifacts, real fabrication partners, and real international stakes
• Faculty leadership: scholars and makers across four colleges contributing expertise no single department could supply alone
• Global partnership: a working relationship between Â鶹¾«Ñ¡and one of Florence's most storied institutions, the Opera di Santa Croce
• Research distinction: the kind of ambitious, interdisciplinary work that helped establish Â鶹¾«Ñ¡as an R1 research university