A new tapestry featuring several items from the USC Libraries’ Special Collections was unveiled recently in USC’s new Ronald Tutor Campus Center, which celebrated its grand opening on August 26. “The Trojan Family Tapestry,” by world-renowned artist John Nava, depicts a frieze of students, athletes, and other members of the USC community atop a field of cultural documents and binary code. An article on the USC News website tells the story of the tapestry, the signature commission of the Tutor Center’s Art & Trojan Traditions program.
In a caption on display next to the tapestry, Nava explains the background field:
The ‘ground’ in the image is made up of a mosaic of texts – literally the stuff of cultural memory. Various fragments reflect the timeless – ancient Sanskrit, Mayan codicies, Don Quixote, etc. – and the timely with all suffused in a field of binary code. This ‘cardinal and gold’ information field structures the wall and envelops the figures themselves – they are embedded in this ‘idea world’ even as they move through it.
Nava’s selection of texts underscores the breadth of the libraries’ Special Collections. From a letter containing birthday greetings for novelist Lion Feuchtwanger from physicist Albert Einstein (Feuchtwanger Memorial Library); to the first illustrated English version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Boeckmann Center); to a pictographic codex from the Mixtec Highlands of Mexico (Boeckmann Center), the tapestry invokes cultural and intellectual treasures from multiple languages, millennia, and academic subjects.
The newly-unveiled tapestry hangs in the entrance lobby of the Steven and Kathryn Sample Hall. Check back to Libwire for a series of posts highlighting the various documents.