01 — The spark
A dean who collected impossible ideas.
It started as a standing promise. In meetings, Dean Jim Blank would say that one day the college would take on something genuinely crazy — the kind of project that doesn't fit on a budget line. That appetite for ambitious, interdisciplinary work was part of the momentum that helped carry Kent State toward R1 research status.
When the idea finally arrived, it was a statue. Scan a European masterwork the way the David had been digitized — then bring it home not as a file, but as an object you could stand in front of. The question was no longer whether it could be imagined. It was who would actually make it.
02 — The brief
Every constraint was a decision about meaning.
Foam — the way theater builds its props — was rejected early. Up close it never reads as marble. A farm of cheap plastic FDM printers wouldn't hold together at the scale required. The answer was binder jetting: sand bound with adhesive, building marble-like mass and surface layer by layer.
Scale came from modeling the room. At 80%, she would hold the end of the exhibit hall exactly — full presence, never cropped by the sightline. And because she'd stand on a second floor, weight was a ceiling, not a detail: heavy enough to feel significant, light enough to be safe.
We didn't want her lightweight and insignificant. Insignificant reads as cheap.
03 — Florence
A scanner on a monopod, held out over a priceless statue.
The capture rig was deliberately simple and deliberately practiced: an Artec Eva on a long carbon-fiber monopod, with an iPad carried alongside for live feedback on every pass. Over 100+ scans built up the full figure — and not just one. The Libertas were a group, and the work honored the whole of them, the plural that became singular on its way to America.
Access was its own project. Before a hand could touch the work, there was insurance, a notary, and an Italian tax ID obtained in person at a government office. Approval reportedly reached as far as Pope Francis. And the work happened steps from Dante's tomb in Santa Croce.
I planned that moment in my head for weeks — holding a scanner out over a priceless statue on the end of a pole — before we ever landed.
04 — The digital sculpt
One enormous mesh, and the artistry of cleaning it up.
A hundred-plus scans don't align themselves. They came together as a single, unwieldy mesh with seams and overlap artifacts — flaws that would have printed faithfully if no one caught them. A 3D animation artist did the fine, patient cleanup that only that craft really teaches.
In parallel, a faculty member in the School of Architecture modeled the exhibit cases and companion prints in Rhino, so the entire show could be seen and approved before anything was committed to print.
The crown's rays were the catch. There wasn't enough scan data to reconstruct them — only enough to measure them, tip to tip. So they were rebuilt by hand in Fusion 360 from reference photos taken on site.
05 — The rays
Cast in aluminum. Two flawed pours, one finished crown.
The Fusion 360 rays became a casting pattern, developed with Trent True in aeronautics engineering, and poured in aluminum at Kent State College of Aeronautics and Engineering. Two sets were cast the same day. Both came out flawed — in different ways — so the team built one good crown from two bad pours.
Students welded the aluminum; another polished the welds and the rays to a shine, finished in the physics machine shop with Jay Onders. Then the polished metal was painted to read as bronze. A mounting hole drilled slightly off was quietly corrected (Tammy).
Two bad casts. One good set of rays. That's the whole project in miniature.
06 — Sand to stone
We didn't take her off a mountain. We grew her.
The figure was printed by Fresh Made 3D / Humtown in Youngstown, Ohio. Binder jetting laid down sand and adhesive in thin layers, building a body with marble's weight and grain. Walking the shop floor mid-print and finding Liberty's arm already taking shape was its own kind of awe.
There's an argument inside the material. A traditional marble figure is carved from a quarried mountain. This one was built from sand and binder — abundant, and far gentler on the world. Then it was primed and finished, with Tammy's team painting test pieces before ever committing to the full statue.
Sand and glue, behaving like marble.
07 — The plinth
A stand built to outlast the statue.
The base was fabricated by students — welded steel, height-adjustable, with swappable fascia and a footprint engineered to spread the load within the floor's PSI limit. Nearly indestructible, and honestly a standard-bearer for how a statue stand should be built. (One or two welds are Josh's own, just to have a hand in it.)
08 — The move
Within a bolt of taking the building apart.
The National Park Service — Brent Talbot — supplied the exact clearances for the route from loading dock to gallery. It was narrow and harrowing in places; at one point the team was inches from removing a piece of building trim to get her through.
She fit anyway — with precision, because every dimension had been checked, re-checked, and checked again before a single layer was ever printed. The margin was earned long before move-in day.
We came within a bolt of taking the building apart. She fit.
09 — The exhibit
Nobody argued about whether they were looking at the real thing.
She held the end of the hall exactly as modeled. Visitors who grew up going to church at Santa Croce said it was like standing in Florence again — and the quality of the figure itself was never in question.
She didn't stand alone. Companion prints filled the cases, a poetry experience built with David Hassler's Wick Poetry team ran on kiosks that Josh specified and supported, and the project lived online on a site he built on AWS — WordPress on the Divi framework — with marketing design by Alyssa Mazey.
They were looking at the real thing — through the hands of everyone who cared to keep it.
10 — An end date
The biggest story the college ever told — and then the doors closed.
The exhibit became the college's biggest story: coverage in Forbes and a nomination for Best International Exhibit. Then COVID closed everything; gathering around a statue was no longer possible.
De-installation happened in masks. At the very end, Jim made everyone pull their masks off for a single photo. The event roughly broke even — which, for a project about liberty as something public and shared, felt exactly right.
Talk about liberty. Why did that have an end date?
The maker
Joshua Allen Talbott
Project Lead · Digital Artist · Scanning & Fabrication
I came to this as the college's IT and security lead — but I took it on as a maker. The scanning in Florence was mine to plan and carry: the rig, the practice, the hundred-plus passes. So was the alignment and digital sculpt, the CAD reconstruction and aluminum casting of the crown's rays, the scale and sightline modeling that set her at 80%, the coordination of fabrication and finishing, and the web and exhibit infrastructure that held the whole show together.
The point was never to put my name on a pedestal. It was to make something that mattered — to use a university as the third space it's meant to be, a place where people gather around an idea worth gathering around. This is a record of that, told honestly from the maker's side, with room for everyone else's telling alongside it.
View her in the round
A reconstruction you can turn in your hands.
A placeholder point-cloud reconstruction — a nod to the hundred-plus scans she was built from. Drag to orbit. When the master mesh is ready, export it as .glb and swap this for a full model viewer.
<!-- When your .glb is exported, replace the canvas above with: --> <script type="module" src="https://unpkg.com/@google/model-viewer/dist/model-viewer.min.js"></script> <model-viewer src="liberty.glb" alt="Liberty — 3D reconstruction" camera-controls auto-rotate shadow-intensity="1" style="width:100%;height:640px;background:#120e0a"> </model-viewer>
Voices — one telling, many hands
This is one account. The project belonged to everyone here.
Every card is a place for that person's own telling — once names are confirmed and their part of the story is added. Until then, they're marked for verification.