Corita Kent


Corita Kent, born Frances Elizabeth Kent and also known as Sister Mary Corita Kent, was an American Roman Catholic religious sister, artist, designer and educator. Key themes in her work included Christianity, and social justice. She was also a teacher at the Immaculate Heart College.
Corita was born Frances Elizabeth Kenthon November 20th in the year of 1918. As a woman from a working poor family, there were not a lot of options for her in terms of work. At 18 years of age Kent entered the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, which were known to be very progressive and welcomed creativity. Frances joined a teaching order, taking the name Sister Mary Corita. Initially she taught young children on an Inuit Reservation in British Columbia until returning to Los Angeles to study for her bachelor's degree at Immaculate Heart College and her master's degree at University of Southern California. She was the head of the art department at Immaculate Heart College. where she also taught a wide variety of different painting styles. Her artwork contained her own spiritual expression and love for her God.
Sister Corita Kent's primary medium was silk screen, also known as Serigraphy. She became self-taught after she sent away for a
DIY silk screening kit. Her innovative methods pushed back the limitations of two-dimensional mediums of the times. Kent's emphasis on printing was partially due to her wish for democratic outreach, as she wished for affordable art for the masses. Her artwork, with its messages of love and peace, was particularly popular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. After a cancer diagnosis in the early 1970s, she entered an extremely prolific period in her career, including the Rainbow Swash design on the LNG storage tank in Boston, and the 1985 version of the United States Postal Service's special stamp.
In recent years, Corita has gained increased recognition for her role in the pop art movement. Critics and theorists previously failed to count her work as part of any mainstream "canon," but in the last few years there has been a resurgence of attention given to Kent. As both a nun and a woman making art in the twentieth century, she was in many ways cast to the margins of the different movements she was a part of.
Corita's art was her activism, and her spiritually-informed social commentary promoted love and tolerance.

Early life and education

Frances Elizabeth Kent was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa in 1918. Upon entering the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles in 1936, Kent took the name Sister Mary Corita. She took classes at Otis and Chouinard Art Institute and earned her BA from Immaculate Heart College in 1941. She earned her MA at the University of Southern California in Art History in 1951.

Career

Between 1938 and 1968 Kent lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart Community. She taught in the Immaculate Heart College and became the chair of its art department in 1964. Her classes at Immaculate Heart were an avant-garde mecca for prominent, ground-breaking artists and inventors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Cage, Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and Charles & Ray Eames. Kent credited Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller, and art historian Dr. Alois Schardt for their important roles in her intellectual and artistic growth. By the early 1950s, she had such a unique and well-known aesthetic and teaching style that clergy members from all over the country were sent to be educated at Immaculate Heart College. Her students were drawn to her selflessness and unique teaching methods such as large class assignments like asking students to create 200 drawings or take three hours to draw their arm without looking at what they were creating.
Kent toured widely the following decade. After the Second Vatican Council, Kent transformed Immaculate Heart College’s annual Mary’s Day procession into a community celebration which was part of the sister’s campaign to bring secular people together. During this time, Kent’s work became increasingly political, addressing events such as the Vietnam War and humanitarian crises. For example, she was commissioned by the Physicians for Social Responsibility to create what she called "we can create life without war" billboards. Tensions between the order and church leadership were mounting, with the Los Angeles archdiocese criticizing the college as "liberal" and Cardinal James McIntyre labeling the college as "communist" and Kent’s work as "blasphemous." Due to this, Kent returned to secular life in 1968 as Corita Kent. Most sisters followed suit and the Immaculate Heart College closed in 1980. Corita Kent also embraced the many different revolutions going on in the world at this time. These revolutions where the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, and Women rights.
Kent created several hundred serigraph designs, for posters, book covers, and murals. Her work includes the 1985 United States Postal Service stamp ' and the 1971 Rainbow Swash, the largest copyrighted work of art in the world, covering a high natural gas tank in Boston. She did not attend the unveiling of the Love stamp because she wanted it to happen at the United Nations and was not happy with the message that was sent when the design was unveiled on the Love Boat. Her 1985 work "love is hard work" was made in response. The stamp itself sold successfully- over 700 million times. Kent was also commissioned to create work for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, and the 1965 IBM Christmas display in New York. Her 1951 print, ' had won first prizes in printmaking at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, Art, and at the California State Fair.
Kent's work has been exhibited extensively beginning in 1952. By the 1960s, Kent had already shown work at 230 exhibitions across the country and her work was included in the collections the Achenbach Foundation Graphic Arts, the Fogg museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the National Serigraph Society, the Norman Rockwell Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Artistic style

Corita Kent worked at the intersection of several powerful and at times contradictory cultural, political, and religious influences. Corita Kent, inspired by the works of Andy Warhol, began using popular culture as raw material for her work in 1962. Her screen prints often incorporated the archetypical product of brands of American consumerism alongside spiritual texts. Her design process involved appropriating an original advertising graphic to suit her idea; for example, she would tear, rip, or crumble the image, then re-photograph it. She often used grocery store signage, texts from scripture, newspaper clippings, song lyrics, and writings from literary greats such as Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Albert Camus as the textual focal point of her work.
E.E. Cummings was one of Kent's earliest and strongest influences. She quotes him in her work separately more than a dozen times and was inspired by a line from one of his lectures to create an entire series of alphabet prints. In her 1966 piece ', she uses quotes from Winnie the Pooh, Kierkegaard, and an ad slogan for men's cologne. Using everyday consumer bought items, like Wonderbread, she was able to bring words and thoughts about her religion to a familiar product that people saw and used everyday. By creating juxtaposition between formally acknowledged or respected "art" and the art Corita saw in her everyday world – at the supermarket, on a walk, in the classroom – she elevated the banal to the holy. "Like a priest, a shaman, a magician, she could pass her hands over the commonest of the everyday, the superficial, the oh-so-ordinary, and make it a vehicle of the luminous, the only, and the hope filled," noted Corita's friend, theologian Harvey Cox.
Corita's earliest work was mostly iconographic, drawing inspiration and material from the Bible and other religious sources. Her style is heavily text-based, scripture passages or positive quotes often encompassing entire compositions with bold and highly saturated typefaces. Despite the often surreal or disorienting compositions of her works, her pieces are "always about something." By the 1960s, her work started becoming increasingly political. For example, her silkscreen print, ' is a large piece protesting the use of nuclear weaponry in bold, blue letters against a white and red background.
Kent produced her oeuvre during her time at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles in response to the Catholic reform in the 1960s by the Vatican Council II as well as several political and social issues happening at the time. Her work itself aided in the Vatican II movement, a movement to modernize and make relevant the Catholic Church. Kent’s use of English church texts in her work, for example, made an impact on the Vatican II’s efforts to normalize conducting Mass in English. Because of her strongly political art, she and others left their order to create the Immaculate Heart Community in 1970 to avoid problems with their archdiocese.
The "Big G" logo that Kent appropriated from General Mills was to stress the idea of ‘goodness’, while the elements from Esso gasoline ads were meant to project the internal power within humans. Unsurprisingly, a Christian subtext does underscore several of her artworks, but not all, which are open to interpretation.
One of Kent’s prints, , depicts photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. overlaid with her handwritten words, "The king is dead. Love your brother," outlining one of her more serious artworks, and presenting her views on politics and human nature. Her collages took popular images, often with twisted or reversed words, to comment on the political unrest of the period, many of which could have been found at any number of marches or demonstrations, some of which she attended herself.

Death and legacy

Corita Kent was diagnosed with cancer in 1974. After this diagnosis, in the Back Bay of Boston, Kent confined her art to water color painting and only pursued printmaking if it was in order to say something substantiative. She died on September 18, 1986 in Watertown Massachusetts at the age of sixty-seven. She left her copyrights and unsold works to the Immaculate Heart College Community.
She has had solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and is shown in several art museums with some including the Whitney, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as private collectors. An archive is dedicated to her at the Immaculate Heart High School in Los Feliz, LA. Some of Sister Corita's papers and early artwork are in Schlesinger Library, in the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Recent solo exhibitions of Kent's work include: Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, There Will Be New Rules Next Week at Dundee Contemporary Arts.
The Corita Art Center, a gallery and archive dedicated to preserving and promoting the work and spirit of Corita Kent, was founded in 1997 is located on the campus of Immaculate Heart High School in Los Feliz, Los Angeles.
Corita Kent received the American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal in 2016.

Awards and recognition