Millard Sheets and the Word of Life

1964 · the library mural the students renamed

The commission: The largest single work of art on this ground was an afterthought, by the commissioning president's own account. Father Hesburgh, planning the university's new Memorial Library in the early 1960s, took the idea for its blank, windowless south wall from the Central Library iconography at Mexico City's national university, and commissioned the California artist Millard Sheets — designer, painter and mosaicist, then director of the Los Angeles County Fair's art exhibitions — to fill it. Sheets's subject was Christ the Teacher, the Word of Life of John 1:1–5, standing amid the prophets, saints and scholars of the Christian tradition.

The work: The mural covers the library's south facade above the reflecting pool: 134 feet high and 68 feet wide, made of 324 panels carrying some 6,700 pieces of granite cut and assembled under Sheets's direction at the Cold Spring Granite Company in Minnesota, the stone in more than 140 colors drawn from sixteen foreign countries and eleven states. It was unveiled at the library's dedication on May 7, 1964. The students renamed it at once and forever: raised arms and all, the figure reads from the stadium as Christ signaling a score, and Touchdown Jesus is the name the world knows. The university gave the mural a $280,000 facelift in the summer of 1994 and has kept it under preventative maintenance since; the library it fronts is now the Hesburgh Library.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, Facilities Design and Operations, "The Word of Life Mural" — the 134-by-68-foot size, the 324 panels, the approximately 6,700 granite pieces, the 1994 facelift, and the preventative maintenance.
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, "Hesburgh Library Word of Life (Touchdown Jesus) Mural" — Father Hesburgh's account of the afterthought and the Mexico City model, and Sheets's direction of the cutting and assembling at Cold Spring Granite.
3. Fighting Irish / University of Notre Dame, "Word of Life Mural" — the May 7, 1964 unveiling and dedication, and the stone in more than 140 colors from sixteen countries and eleven states.