Sacred Creations

“Remember ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’? Think of that--times 10.” Sculptor Simon Toparovsky is recounting the perils and thrills of creating a life-size bronze crucifix for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Like author Irving Stone’s interpretation of Michelangelo’s ordeal in the Sistine Chapel, the saga of adorning the enormous new cathedral, which opens Sept. 3 in downtown Los Angeles, is fraught with angst and drama.

In this case, it’s a tale of nine artists who were commissioned to make artworks and furnishings for the $200-million complex designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo. Each artist’s experience was different, but they all faced considerable challenges. If they didn’t struggle to mesh their ideas with those of church authorities, they wrestled with killer deadlines and technical obstacles.

“It was just this mad 26 months, seven days a week, 10- or 12-hour days--an insane amount of work,” says John Nava. A figurative painter based in Ojai, he made his first foray into weaving in a big way at the cathedral--designing 620 square yards of tapestries that encompass a procession of 135 saints, most of them 10 feet tall, a baptismal scene that soars to 45 feet, and a smaller, abstract panel behind the altar.

Lita Albuquerque, a Los Angeles artist who designed a water wall, circular fountain and star map for the threshold of the cathedral plaza, says she got so bogged down in technical issues and building delays that at one point she threw up her hands and fumed, “I’m not in art; I’m in construction.”

Even Robert Graham, an L.A. sculptor who deflects most questions about the 25-ton bronze doors he made for the cathedral, admits that every aspect of the project was complicated. “It was all a daunting effort,” he says, when pressed to detail the process.

But all the artists agree that they have been given an extraordinary opportunity: their artworks installed at Moneo’s landmark cathedral. On view at the center of one of the world’s largest cities--in an increasingly distinguished cultural corridor that encompasses Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art--their work will be seen by a vast audience they can only imagine.

Graham has completed major public pieces across the country, including the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial in Washington, D.C. But the cathedral doors are by far his biggest hometown commission.

Nava’s tapestries have launched him into a sphere of expertise and visibility that most figurative painters wouldn’t even dream of.

For other artists, such as woodworker Jeff Tortorelli, who specializes in liturgical art at his in La Verne studio, work at the cathedral is “an incredible blessing.” His commission--including the cathedra, the bishop’s chair near the altar; and a height-adjustable ambo, or pulpit--will allow him to continue, he says, “the kind of work I do. It’s going to give me recognition in this field and hopefully open up doors to different parts of the country.”

“This is the thing that you come through your whole life to do,” says Los Angeles-based sculptor M.L. Snowden, who made a wreath of gold angels that wraps around the cylindrical base of the massive central stone altar.

The process of choosing the artists and orchestrating their projects was the task of the archdiocese’s art consultant, Father Richard S. Vosko. A priest and scholar of religion, art, architecture and adult education who lives in Clifton Park, N.Y., Vosko has fashioned an unusual professional niche for himself. His business cards identify him as a “designer and consultant for worship environments.” During the past two decades, he has written extensively about sacred space and worked on dozens of churches, but Our Lady of the Angels is by far his biggest job to date.

It began in the spring of 1997 with a call from Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, inviting him to create a master plan and oversee delivery for all art furnishings and appointments in the cathedral building and plaza. The first phase of the project, to be completed before the opening, was budgeted at $6 million. The money was to be raised from donors, some of whom earmarked their contributions for specific works.

Vosko began his tenure by heading off to Madrid for a weeklong visit with Moneo, long after the building design had been approved. The goal was “to get a glimpse of Moneo’s vision and to share with him the liturgical requirements of the space,” Vosko says. “It is one thing to create a beautiful cathedral building, but one must not forget the primary function of the whole operation. The cathedral primarily exists to offer people a place to worship God and be educated, and to reach out to people who are hungry and homeless. That’s really the bottom line.”

Like many architects, Moneo--who couldn’t be reached for comment--might prefer that his building be unadorned by art. And like artists everywhere, those who eventually won cathedral commissions thrive on developing their own ideas.

But, as Vosko says, “you can’t do that with a religious project.” That means “you are stuck with a bit of tension.” Part of his strategy for resolving differences was “to get to know the artists, find out what makes them tick and share with them the mythology and significance of the theology and Scriptures” they were asked to interpret.

But first there had to be a master plan. Drawing from Scripture, mythology and theology, and working with ideas that had been discussed within the archdiocese but hadn’t been assembled in what Vosko calls “a nice big picture,” he presented the first draft to Mahony in late 1997.

“It served as a blueprint and began to articulate a theme, or story board, for the entire project,” he says. The central ideas--already established by Moneo and Mahony--concerned concepts of light and pilgrimage. The cathedral building was seen as a radiant receptacle and dispenser of light; those who come there would take a journey of fulfillment, or pilgrimage, as they walked through its exterior spaces and proceeded through its doors into the ambulatory and nave. At specific points along the way, liturgical artworks and furnishings would enhance the experience.

Artists had begun inquiring about possible commissions several years before Vosko was hired. After his arrival, the list of contenders grew much longer--to several hundred names, although no one seems to know the total number. Vosko thought Southern California artists should be included. Being new to the area, he asked the archdiocese to assemble an arts-and-furnishings advisory committee. Its members--including Msgr. Kevin Kostelnik, pastor of the new cathedral; Daniel Donohue, president of the Dan Murphy Foundation, an L.A.-based Catholic service organization that contributed $25 million to the cathedral; and Mission Hills folk artist Lalo Garcia, who would be commissioned to create an outdoor shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe for the plaza--helped him draw up the list of candidates and guide the project’s development.

Mahony was intimately involved with the process. Moneo attended some sessions with the artists as their projects developed, but they had little--if any--interaction with him.

Artists were invited to submit portfolios in the spring of 1998. “We spent the better part of a year sifting through all the possibilities, then created a short list and invited people to submit proposals for specific projects,” Vosko says.

Being a member of the Roman Catholic Church was not a requirement. While several of the commissioned artists were raised as Catholics, few are actively involved in the church. Johnny Bear Contreras, a member of the Kumeyaay tribe who lives on the San Pasqual reservation east of Escondido and has created a bronze memorial to Native Americans for the plaza, has a Catholic background but now practices his tribal traditions. He doesn’t think the distinction is important: “We are all under one umbrella.”

Sculptor Max De Moss, who made candleholders and a towering receptacle for consecrated bread and wine, is a member of a Greek Orthodox family. Toparovsky was raised as a devout Jew, but says that his work focuses on the human condition and that his attitude toward religion is wide open.

“I would give credit to the committee for not making a fuss about this,” Toparovsky says. “It didn’t seem to be a problem.”

The point, Vosko says, was “to find artists who know how to make good art,” not to screen them for religious affiliation. “There’s a lot of religious art out there,” he says, “but it’s god-awful stuff.” The reason? “Churches have not been courting good artists.”

Still, the courtship was sometimes a high-stress affair. Toparovsky submitted a portfolio of his work, as requested, but heard nothing for two years. When he finally got a letter inviting him to submit a proposal for the main altar crucifix, he was also told to present his plan at a specific time and date. He was scheduled to be in Italy then, installing a big project he had worked on for several years. Vosko said the meeting couldn’t be postponed and advised him to make a video.

“I was shocked,” he says. “I had never made a video, so I called in every favor that I had in the entertainment industry. I even had tutoring in voice-overs.” Leaving nothing to chance, he also arranged for a Beta video monitor to be delivered by a technician who would set it up and adjust the volume.

In sharp contrast, Snowden says her commission entailed technical challenges but no other difficulties. Instead of presenting drawings or models for the base of the altar, as might have been expected, she made a full-scale frieze of steel and silver that laid out her composition on a rectangular panel. The same configuration of four airborne angels--in gold-plated bronze--now encircles the altar, while the frieze hangs in the entry to cathedral offices.

For other artists, being selected was only the beginning of a long process as they worked with Vosko and the committee to carry out established themes and conform to traditions while creating an identity for the cathedral that would link it to Los Angeles.

“This building has to tell the story of folks here,” Vosko says. “You’ve got a Spanish architect and there’s a reference to mission-style forms here. But what about the stories of the people who actually live and worship here?”

One of those stories will be told by Contreras, who says his memorial, “Spirit of the Earth,” grew out of “tons of meetings and talks about spirituality and Native American traditions.” The sculpture--a man rising out of swirling water but still struggling against enormous pressure--is based on a specific Kumeyaay creation myth. But it also symbolizes all Native Americans’ journey through life and “the journey that takes place at the cathedral itself,” he says.

Tracking that journey in terms of artworks, Vosko begins with Albuquerque’s fountain and water wall, designed in collaboration with architect Robert Kramer and located at the threshold of the plaza. She was given several Scriptures and asked to base her work on the one she chose. She settled on Jesus’ request for a drink of water from a Samaritan woman he encountered at a well. Mahony then compressed the Scripture into the words “I shall give you living water.” Albuquerque had planned to inscribe a longer form of the Scripture on the wall by the low, circular fountain. Instead, the short version--translated into 37 languages spoken by cathedral parishioners--will be sandblasted into a horizontal marble disk on the fountain.

In addition to the wall and fountain that were requested, she designed a star map for the surrounding pavement. The idea was approved, but it won’t be carried out until a later phase of the project. Even then, it won’t be quite what Albuquerque envisioned.

She had hoped to design her own composition of constellations. But in keeping with Catholic tradition, the map had to replicate the sky at vespers the night before the cathedral is dedicated. A deep-blue glass lining on a pond above the wall and a vertical glass piece designed for the wall, to connect it visually with other components of her work and Graham’s doors, also have been postponed until money is raised for the next phase of the master plan.

Moving on through the plaza, Vosko proudly points out that Garcia’s ceramic tile shrine includes “faces of the children of Los Angeles” as well as a large painting of Guadalupe. To be installed nearby, Contreras’ bronze “Spirit of the Earth” memorial is meant to welcome Native Americans and honor their traditions.

Then come Graham’s massive doors. The artist says he got “a 30-by-30-foot hole” for his project, along with a directive from Mahony to put Our Lady of the Angels on the doors. There were also “some suggestions” as his design progressed. Most of them pertained to his portrayal of Mary on the tympanum, a horizontal structure above the doors, and multicultural religious symbols and representations of the Virgin in the New World that appear in relief on the lower part of the doors.

“Bob had a lot of ideas for the Virgin,” Vosko says of Graham. But the initial ones were rejected, including a figure with the infant Jesus at her breast. The version that won approval--a sturdy, simply dressed figure with outstretched hands and a thick braid of hair--is “a new vision of what this woman can be,” Vosko says.

Those who walk through Graham’s doors will enter the south ambulatory, with six chapels on the right side. One of them is a separate room that houses De Moss’ 10-foot-tall bronze and silver tabernacle. A hinged structure composed of three towers, the tabernacle is intended to “provide a physical connection to the life, death and resurrection of Christ,” De Moss says. At the end of the ambulatory is a 17th century Spanish Baroque retablo (see story, this page), formerly lodged at a seminary in Mission Hills.

In the central, soaring space of the cathedral, Nava was asked to create “a communion of saints” for two facing walls. The idea was to have a frieze of figures, representing real saints, to inspire worshipers, he says. At first, the notion struck him as “kind of bland,” but the more he thought about it, the better it sounded. “It’s really the essential core idea of the church, the image of the church as a body of people.”

Nava wanted the figures to look “completely believable and make a real connection” to those who come to the cathedral. The solution was to use real people--friends, members of his family and strangers plucked off the streets of Ojai by Cyrena Hausman, a former casting director--to portray the saints. He painted their portraits, hands and feet as fast as possible and composed their robed bodies digitally. With the help of Donald Farnsworth, a Bay Area artist noted for art applications of digital technology, he assembled groups of figures in digital form and e-mailed them to Flanders Tapestries, a weaving studio in Belgium.

To make the tapestries blend into the concrete walls, Nava designed the backgrounds and robes with fresco-like textures. The piece behind the altar, which is particularly subtle and appears to be an abstraction, is composed of concentric circles overlaid on a street map of downtown Los Angeles, including the site of the cathedral.

The specific saints depicted on the tapestries were selected by the archdiocese’s multicultural committee. Nava had hoped that a large number, say 50 or 60, of the 135 figures would not be named, to make the idea of sainthood less remote and suggest that anyone can become a saint. The committee’s list of saints kept growing, but he included eight unnamed figures--four teenage boys in tennis shoes, two little girls and a Japanese mother with her baby.

The altar sits at the apex of the nave, with the bishop’s chair and pulpit nearby. Toparovsky’s crucifix--to be installed on a pole behind the altar, with the feet about 39 inches above the floor--involves a single life-size figure, but it’s weighted with 2,000 years of history and countless interpretations. Each member of the cathedral art committee seemed to have a different idea of how this particular crucifix should look. “I decided the only way I could be successful was to transcend all of those limitations and just do the best work I have ever done,” the artist says.

When Toparovsky began, Vosko suggested that he read the book “A Doctor at Calvary,” written in 1953 by Pierre Barbet, which describes in clinical detail the ordeal of crucifixion and the brutal treatment that preceded it. Toparovsky had envisioned a relatively transcendent, sweet image. The book changed that, but he ultimately decided that he didn’t want to make a sculpture that would terrify children. The result is a tortured Jesus whose skin is a mass of abrasions and whose limbs are broken and swollen, but one who is not violently distorted.

As their works are finished and installed, the artists are breathing easier and taking stock of their accomplishments.

“It’s odd to have done a major figurative project that is not ironic,” says Nava, musing on where his tapestries fit into art history. “The figurative painters I admire take a pessimistic view. This had to be entirely hopeful and life-affirming. It’s tricky to do that without Disneyfying the art or making it sentimental.”

As for Graham’s monumental project, “I’m very proud of it,” the artist says. “But it doesn’t have much to do with me anymore. I’m happy to start letting it go.”

*

Suzanne Muchnic is a Times staff writer.