Where the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels' first article describes Rafael Moneo's austere concrete forms and its alabaster windows, its most detailed storytelling happens in textile rather than stone or glass. The Communion of Saints, a cycle of twenty five tapestries designed by the California artist John Nava, lines the nave on both sides, individual panels running as tall as twenty one feet, depicting a procession of one hundred thirty six named saints and beatified figures alongside a dozen unnamed representative worshippers, running the length of the nave above the seated congregation.
Nava worked from photographs of real, contemporary models to build each saint's face and posture before the designs were sent to a workshop in Belgium for weaving using traditional tapestry techniques, a deliberate choice meant to root historical religious figures in recognizably present day human features rather than in idealized medieval iconography. A final panel, a Marian tapestry, completed the cycle years after the cathedral's 2002 dedication, closing a project its own artist described as never fully finished until that last addition was hung.
The building's bronze entrance doors, designed separately by sculptor Robert Graham, carry their own dense iconography, cast at a combined weight of roughly twenty five tons and set beneath a bronze statue above the entrance representing Our Lady of the Angels, her face deliberately blended from Asian, African American and Caucasian features rather than rendered in any single ethnic likeness. Between the doors, the tapestries and the alabaster glow overhead, the cathedral's decoration argues, consistently, for a communion drawn from every background at once rather than from one artistic or cultural tradition.