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Eddie Cota grew up with UT orange as a part of his life, so volunteering his building in Newport for the mural campaign made perfect sense.
Cota removed the siding from a 60-foot outside wall on his new Aire Serv office building in Newport to make way for the mural. Once completed in June 2024, Cocke will be the 53rd county in Tennessee to join the campaign.
Originally from Kingsport, Cota said he grew up with “UT orange everywhere.” While he didn’t attend any of the UT campuses, he has family members who attended UT Knoxville and says he’s always found himself surrounded by fellow UTK athletics fans.
“Most everybody you know that lives in the state are fans of UT,” Cota said.
Cota now lives in Seymour, where he opened Cota’s Comfort Heating and Cooling as a family-owned and operated business in 2010. In 2019, he transitioned the company into an Aire Serv franchise.
One day, while watching the news, Cota saw a segment featuring the mural campaign.
“As I was watching, I thought, ‘That’s pretty cool,’” Cota said. “After the news, I searched around on the Internet looking at the different ones all over the state of Tennessee, and I saw that they didn’t have one in Cocke County.”
Shortly before seeing the news broadcast, Cota purchased the building in Newport to establish an Aire Serv satellite office. He thought the building would be a great addition to the campaign given it faces U.S. Route 321 and U.S. Route 25 and sees an estimated 6,516 passersby every day.
“It offers a little more advertising for us — getting people to look at the building — and UT’s such a great school,” Cota said.
Cocke County Mayor Rob Mathis (Knoxville ’97) considers himself a lifelong UT fan like Cota.
Mathis, who served on the UT National Alumni Association Board of Governors and is currently a leadership development coach in the Haslam Professional MBA program, finds the addition of the mural in Cocke County especially meaningful because of his personal connections to the University.
“Cocke County is Volunteer Country,” Mathis said. “We bleed orange here. Needless to say, we are excited to see this mural going up in our community. It is a wonderful symbol of our partnership with the University of Tennessee and the strong presence the University has in our community. We are a county on the rise and are grateful to have such a great teammate at our side. When we all work together, great things happen.”
The mural in Newport, painted by muralist Curtis Glover, marks county number 53 of the statewide campaign.
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Curtis Glover has been running his mural business for over six years. Based in Knoxville, he is known for his large-scale, highly detailed work covering a multitude of walls in and around the city.
His style and content vary to suit the needs of his clients. As a commercial artist, he’s been hired by all types of businesses in the past that are looking to make a bold statement on their storefronts.
He mainly works with acrylics and spray cans while adding multiple layers to provide depth in his work—which can be seen from Tennessee to Costa Rica.
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