Faces of Faith, Integrity, and Scholarship: The Story Behind De La Salle’s Signature Sculpture

There is a moment, walking into the Kenneth H. Hofmann Student Center, when the eye lifts almost involuntarily. The eastern wall seems to move, faces emerging, stories pressing forward, history gathered into a single, living presence. The sculpture feels immense. And yet, it is only a study.

Its creator, Mario Chiodo, an Oakland native who later made his home in Danville, began imagining this work in the shadow of the September 11 attacks. He set out to honor those who had labored, often at great personal cost, for justice, peace, and human dignity. The full realization of that vision would come in 2011, when Remember Them: Champions for Humanity was unveiled at Henry J. Kaiser Memorial Park, a sweeping installation of bronze and stone spanning 52 feet, carrying 25 portraits and symbolic figures representing the continents.

But three years earlier, in 2008, De La Salle was given something both more intimate and no less profound: a customized version of that vision, created specifically for its students.

Through the generosity of the Varni family and the guidance of the school’s mission, Chiodo shaped a work that would not simply decorate a building, but define it. He added Saint John Baptist de La Salle, the school’s founder, and wove in the symbols that ground the De La Salle identity: the fleur-de-lis, the chain of unity, and the enduring motto Les Hommes de Foi. The result was aptly named Faith, Integrity, Scholarship.

What makes the sculpture remarkable is not only who is present, but how they are presented. Twenty-six faces, diverse in race, belief, era, and struggle, look outward and upward: Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, and many others. Some are instantly recognizable; others invite closer study. All are bound by what Chiodo called “the common threads of courage, perseverance, education, sacrifice, and a sincere desire to strive for a better life for all.”

And then there is the quieter detail, the one easily missed at first glance. Beneath the figures, around them, even in their hands, are books. Ninety-three in all. Texts that have shaped conscience and civilization: The Bible, The City of God, War and Peace, The Rights of Man, The Gettysburg Address, Long Walk to Freedom to name a few. Even our Founder extends his own work, The Conduct of Schools, toward the viewer. Scholarship here is not abstract; it is lived, written, struggled with, and handed on.

In this way, the sculpture does something rare. It gives education a human face, twenty-six of them. It reminds those who pass beneath it that learning is not merely the accumulation of knowledge, but a preparation for action. That faith is not private comfort, but a call outward. That integrity is forged in choices, often difficult ones, made in service of others.

When the piece was dedicated on September 14, 2008, it was not simply unveiled; it was entrusted. As President Mark DeMarco ’78 reflected, the figures represented “every race, religion, age, gender, lifestyle and life struggle we can imagine,” offering a living invitation to the De La Salle community: to love, to instruct, to guide, and to do so in a way that is moral, caring, and joyful.

Since then, teachers have brought their classes to stand before it, not just to look, but to consider. To ask what it means to live a life of consequence. To recognize that the extraordinary is often built from ordinary decisions made with conviction.

The sculpture does not answer those questions. It holds them, steadily, in plaster and silence.

And each student who walks past it, perhaps without noticing at first, is, in time, drawn into that quiet conversation.