Updated at 10:12 a.m.: Revised with the announcement that the Dallas Cowboys are postponing and rescheduling Tuesday's official unveiling.

FRISCO — With its official unveiling in the coming days, Huddle, by internationally acclaimed sculptor Tom Friedman, will mark yet another milestone for the Dallas Cowboys Art Collection.

More than a singular piece of art, its nine figures gathered together in a stainless-steel huddle underscore the Cowboys' increasingly high profile as a major player in the Dallas-Fort Worth art world.

Huddle, a large outdoor sculpture, was created exclusively for the Cowboys.

Artist Tom Friedman stood inside the creation he calls Huddle at The Star in Frisco on Sunday, Aug. 27. (Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer)

"I think they're making a remarkable contribution," Jeremy Strick, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, said of the football team's growing investment in visual art. "Both regionally and nationally. They are making this work accessible to the broad public but also to a public that is generally not accustomed to encountering works of art in that environment."

Huddle increases the Cowboys' portfolio to 79 artworks by 53 artists, with 18 falling under the category of site-specific commissions, both at AT&T Stadium in Arlington and at the franchise's $1.5 billion, 91-acre complex at The Star in Frisco.

When the lavish headquarters here opened a year ago, it did so with the installation of a major light sculpture by Leo Villareal, who gained international renown for The Bay Lights, which now light up the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

The advent of Friedman, a 52-year-old artist from St. Louis, enhances the pedigree even more.

View looking up of artwork created by artist Tom Friedman called "Huddle," at The Star in Frisco on Sunday, August 27, 2017. (Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer)

He is, Strick said, "one of the most inventive artists of our time. He's an artist whose work combines equal measures of humor and sheer wonder."

Strick praises Friedman's ability "to make things in unique and absolutely unexpected and totally surprising ways."

Friedman's latest is a 10-foot-by-18-foot sculpture that, after being installed by workers over the drizzly weekend, elevates to 20 the number of works created by 14 artists at The Star, including two site-specific commissions. Those would be the works by Villareal and Friedman, both of which the public can view for free, 24 hours a day.

Gene Jones, the wife of Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones and the curatorial force behind the collection, performed a coach-like role in making Huddle happen.

She saw an article in W magazine about Friedman's stainless-steel sculpture The Circle Dance, whose inspiration came from Henri Matisse's 1910 piece, La Danse.

"Huddle," by artist Tom Friedman at The Star in Frisco on Monday, August 28, 2017. (Staff Photographer / Vernon Bryant)

Later, she and her daughter, Charlotte Jones Anderson, found themselves at Art Basel in Miami, with Mary Zlot, the Cowboys' art adviser.

"I had shown Mary this picture of what I had seen," said Jones, who revealed the acquisition of Huddle exclusively to The Dallas Morning News. "We knew we wanted something outdoors at The Star, in the circle when you enter the complex, leading to the entrance to the Ford Center. To me, it seemed like the perfect place for a wonderful work of art."

And that, Friedman said with a chuckle, "gave Gene an idea."

Friedman created nine oversize figures rising from the earth, heads touching and arms linked to form a dome with their bodies, symbolizing collaboration and teamwork.

He created the crinkled texture of Huddle by sculpting the figures from disposable roasting pans, then casting them in stainless steel. (Huddle's official unveiling had been scheduled for 2 p.m. Tuesday, but the Cowboys announced shortly before 10 a.m. that the event "has been canceled and will be planned for another day with details to follow.")

Jones passed along credit for Huddle and the collection as a whole to the Cowboys' art advisory council, whose members include, in addition to her and her daughter, Gavin Delahunty, senior curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art; Michael Auping, the recently retired chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Melissa Ireland, the director of TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art; and noted Dallas collectors Howard Rachofsky and Gayle Stoffel.

Rachofsky said that, when the program began, "There was a degree of cynicism about it. There was this sense of, 'Oh, well, they're just decorating.' "

Nearly a decade later, he calls it "a very solid, first-rate collection with first-rate artists that's done with an intention of being singular and special and willing to commit the resources and intellectual gravitas to make it more than anecdotal."

It has, he says, "broadened an audience. It has presented art in a public way in a public environment that exposes people who would not necessarily even be aware of encountering art in the course of their daily lives. Awareness is the first way you make people stop and look at the world around them. And this collection is evolving into one that does just that."

1 / 2Sierra Sanchez, a museum guard, looks after an untitled sculpture by Tom Friedman during a public tour at The Rachofsky Warehouse in Farmers Branch on July 21, 2014. The former industrial building, co-owned by Dallas art collectors Howard Rachofsky and Vernon Faulconer, houses works of art, some co-owned with The Dallas Museum of Art, to be seen by appointment only. (Rose Baca/Neighborsgo Staff Photographer) 2 / 2An untitled work of art by Tom Friedman on display at The Rachofsky Warehouse in Farmers Branch on July 21, 2014. The former industrial building, co-owned by Dallas art collectors Howard Rachofsky and Vernon Faulconer, houses works of art, some co-owned with The Dallas Museum of Art, to be seen by appointment only. (Rose Baca/Neighborsgo Staff Photographer)

Rachofsky nailed it. Hours after being erected in Frisco, Friedman's Huddle was already becoming a haven for selfies while demonstrating how passers-by are lured in by daring visual art.

Anthony Wilson, 27, escaped his hurricane-drenched home in Houston to spend the weekend with his family in North Texas. They all wound up at The Star, not expecting to see a striking piece of sculpture.

"I grew up in Flower Mound," said Wilson, who works at Wal-Mart, "so I'm a big Cowboys fan. To me, this shows the unification of being a Cowboys fan. Being a Cowboys fan really is like being in a family. When you're in the circle like these guys are in the huddle, you're all together. And that, man, is what being a Cowboys fan is all about."