All Saints

As we celebrate the feast of All Saints, I introduce you today to the beautiful tapestries by John Nava in the Cathedral of Los Angeles. In 1999, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles commissioned from the artist John Nava (born 1947) three cycles of tapestries for the walls of its new Cathedral, which was dedicated in 2002.They include 25 monumental tapestries representing a procession of saints of today and yesterday, famous and little-known. The resulting cortege that descends into the nave of the Cathedral is a veritable masterpiece. 

John Nava includes no less than 136 saints, each one of whom he manages to render as vibrantly alive amid the faithful as they are in the company of angels in heaven. Their faces, as though woven from the complex strands of their condition as saved sinners, are striking in their human realism - so much so that, in each, the viewer feels he recognizes an acquaintance, a neighbor, a friend, a brother, a sister.