Jammie Holmes’s Untitled (2024) is a painting that explores the fleeting nature of beauty and success through the depiction of a child emerging from morning glory flowers. As I write this, a giant version of the work, which has been painstakingly hand-painted onto strips of football field turf, is on a plane flying from New York City to Paris.
The turf version of Holmes’s Untitled was commissioned by the NFL for a new initiative called Color Field. The supersized artwork will be rolled out on the end zones of a flag football field beneath the Eiffel Tower on October 23 and 24 for NFL Experience Paris, a free event that will hype the NFL’s first-ever regular season game played in Paris, on October 25.
In December, another iteration of the Color Field concept, featuring a different artist, will roll out on a field at the Art Basel Miami Beach annual show. According to Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior VP of global social, creator & content, more giant murals could start popping up on fields throughout the season, depending on the reaction to this initial launch.
This season features the NFL’s most heavily international game lineup ever, with nine games played across Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, London, Madrid, Munich, and Mexico City, the first three of which are entirely new markets. As the league expands its footprint globally, its marketing team is looking for ways to broaden its digital audience reach. With Color Field, the league is tapping into an unexpected crossover between the worlds of football and fine arts.
A giant turf mural lands in Paris
“Art” and “football” are two words you don’t usually think of in the same sentence. But according to Trombetta, the concept for Color Field was sparked when, several years ago, the league noticed a growing legion of dedicated artists in its online fandom.
“During the pandemic, we noticed that there were a lot of fans who were creating their own NFL art and they were posting it online,” Trombetta says. “We started to think about ways in which we could celebrate those folks, especially because we weren’t in an environment where we could be with people, and it was such an odd, different time. We started to take in the best submissions and we would post them online.”
Eventually, that insight morphed into Artist Replay, an annual event launched in 2023 that brings artists inspired by the NFL, and their works, into one exhibition space. Artists have included Calvin Clausell Jr., Kayla Mahaffey, and McFlyy; as well as a player, Marco Wilson, a cornerback who is on the Carolina Panthers’ practice squad, and a former player, Martellus Bennett.
The success of these events, Trombetta says, further revealed how much overlap already existed between the arts community and the NFL—and how much opportunity might exist for bringing new fans into the fold. Color Field is an expansion of that concept on a physically much bigger scale, mixing Jammie Holmes’s real-life work with a real-life football field.
To create the giant mural, a team of one field specialist and six muralists copied the work onto two 15-by-50-foot chunks of turf in a New York City studio. Once the pieces were complete, they were packed up and shipped off to Paris, where they’ll be installed on that playable flag football field at NFL Experience Paris. Trombetta’s team plans to turn the transport process and roll-out into social media content, so that fans from around the world can see Untitled in situ.
“[As to] the NFL investing in the space where sports and art meet, I see real potential,” Holmes says. “It can introduce new audiences to the world of art and build a genuine bridge between athletes and artists. There’s a lot of overlap; artists train with the same discipline athletes do. The hours in the studio, the consistency, the focus; that kind of work ethic is what creates longevity in anything we pursue.”
Why the NFL is investing in art
The Color Field concept reflects a broader strategy that’s become an important lever in broadening the NFL’s appeal. This August, Marissa Solis, the NFL’s senior VP of global and brand marketing, explained to Fast Company that the league has spent the past five or six years on a concerted effort to reach “growth audiences,” including women, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha.
That’s looked like embracing the “Taylor Swift effect,” the media boost the league received from the relationship between Swift and Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs; turning big moments like draft day into social media extravaganzas; and debuting a kickoff ad campaign dedicated to the NFL’s TikTok fan base.
These efforts are getting results. In 2025, 30% of the audience watching the league’s TikTok draft week content was female, and 44% was between 18 and 24 years old—significantly younger and more female than the NFL’s reach during the regular season. Last year, the league’s internal data also showed that NFL kickoff week video views were up 13%, minutes spent on socials were up 25%, and engagements up 6%—all records for a kickoff week.
As the NFL brings its games to new global locations, activations like Color Field serve as a way to attract local audiences, cater to existing fan bases online, and create social content that might catch the eye of new fans.
“One of the fundamental goals that we have is to increase the reach of the NFL—meaning how many people we’re speaking to on a day-in, day-out basis,” Trombetta says. “Whether that’s through the game experience or through social media or through live events, there’s so many different touchpoints for us, and [Color Field] is certainly a way for us to increase reach in new communities.”