Not your average piece of concrete

• UW-River Falls Seal

Nolan King is the artist of the UW-River Falls seal that will be in front of South Hall. “It has become more of a piece of art then a design or seal for me,” King said. Ashley Hall photo.

Talk about it

It all started with an idea of a poem and ended with the carving of the UW-River Falls seal by a River Falls man.

With the East Cascade Avenue construction in full swing, the construction around the buildings was starting to take shape.

The sidewalks were starting to be poured and an employee in the Facilities Management department had her son give her an idea about what to do on the concrete.

“Her son was doing these poem sidewalk art projects at his school,” Joe McIntosh, the UWRF grounds maintenance manager said. “So we adapted his idea into doing something similar in front of South Hall.”

The plan was to write a poem around a UWRF symbol and to put it in front of South Hall facing Cascade.

The idea morphed into putting just the UWRF seal in front of South Hall “because it is a timeless seal,” McIntosh said.

The Facilities Department approached the company that was doing the construction on Cascade. The company did not want to be a part of it. McIntosh then asked Nolan King, owner of King Architectural Concrete and Construction in River Falls, to submit a bid.

“The university came to me with their original idea,” King said. “They asked me to draw something out that would match what they had in mind.”

King is a UWRF 2001 alum and graduated with an agriculture engineering degree along with an art minor. King started his company two months after he graduated.

“I wasn’t intentionally planning on doing this,” King said. “But after taking some Cimstone (quartz) classes, I loved it.”

Read more in the Aug. 23 print edition of the River Falls Journal.

Tags: uw river falls, news, business