When visitors step into the new federal courthouse in Greenville next year, one of the first things they will see is a vast, hand-crafted landscape of river, sky, and Delta earth – an artwork designed and built by Mississippi State University professor Critz Campbell.
Campbell’s piece, “Cloud Field Ferry,” was commissioned through the U.S. General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture program, which has supported major public artworks in federal buildings since the 1930s. For Campbell, the selection still feels extraordinary.
“It is difficult to describe how honored I am to have a work included in the GSA’s Art in Architecture collection,” he said. “As an artist, having the opportunity to design and install a piece that will hang publicly and be cared for over many decades to come is a dream come true.”
A landscape without pointing to a place
The Mississippi Delta, Campbell said, shaped nearly every decision in the 26-foot-tall work.
“The Delta landscape is inescapable and magical,” he said. “I had the challenge of designing an artwork that celebrates that magic without pointing to a specific place or moment.”
For months, he wrestled with how to evoke the region without literally depicting it. The solution came from returning to fundamentals. “I came back to the basics of design – symmetry, proportion, and perspective,” he said.
These principles guide the composition: a vast faceted “sky,” an expanse of geometric farmland below, and a thin, electric line of hunter orange marking the horizon. Campbell calls that orange sliver the anchor of the piece – quiet but unmistakable.
Clouds, barges, birds, coffins: layers of metaphor
Suspended across the top of the work are seven rectangular forms. They may look like clouds at first glance, but Campbell embraced their ambiguity.
“My work is best when the familiar carries layers of metaphor,” he said.
The shapes deliberately echo the long barges that move along the Mississippi River, the formations of migratory birds, and even a “diaspora.” They also carry a more solemn note: “They have a coffin quality, which I’ve found myself drawn to as metaphor ever since reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.”
Campbell chose seven forms as a symbolic gesture – “Seven is significant in countless religions… Seven heavens, seven steps of Siddhartha, seven deadly sins.”
The title “Cloud Field Ferry” was inspired by a beloved painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, “Sky Above Clouds,” which employs a similar elevated, contemplative perspective.
Built by hand, panel by panel
Although the surface of the artwork appears smooth and uniform from afar, its construction was intensely labor-heavy. The work consists not of ceramic, as some assume, but of 64 hollow wooden panels, each built like a guitar body.
“The shell of each panel is constructed in plywood that I then skinned with ash-veneered MDF,” he said. The ash, with its pale tone and linear grain, softens the geometry once coated with hand-burnished milk paint.
Each facet was formed by hand. Each seam was intentionally exposed. And each panel had to be lifted, aligned, and installed nearly 50 feet above the courthouse atrium floor.
The installation, Campbell admits, was the most daunting part. “I had never installed work at this scale or importance,” he said. He recruited two recent MSU sculpture graduates and a maker from West Point. “I couldn’t have had a better crew.”
The job took six ten-hour days. “The end of each day was exhausting and totally exciting. Installing this piece was the ultimate challenge of how.”
A place for quiet in a serious space
From the beginning, the courthouse’s judges guided the emotional tone of the work. “They asked that I design a piece that didn’t dwell on history and provided the viewer the opportunity to meditate on the piece and find calm,” Campbell said.
The resulting one-point perspective – centered, symmetrical, drawing the eye toward a distant vanishing point – was inspired in part by a moment back home.
“I think it clicked for me when I attended Easter service at the Methodist church,” he said. “The symmetry and perspective in the architecture and stained glass are very moving. I began to think of the piece like a quilt or stained-glass window.”
A Delta reflection that belongs to everyone
Neither literal map nor nostalgic tableau, “Cloud Field Ferry” invites interpretation. The viewer may see clouds or barges, farmland or geometry, spiritual symbols or simple color and shape.
Campbell is comfortable with that openness.
“I enjoy work that has the potential to be interpreted in layers of metaphor – or just as a landscape with clouds,” he said.
Soon, his vision of the Delta – formal, meditative, and quietly luminous – will become part of the daily rhythm of a place where the stakes are high and the stories are many.
“Familiarity opens the doors to contemplation,” Campbell wrote in his original proposal. That’s the respite he hopes “Cloud Field Ferry” will offer.
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