Sister Mary Corita
Corita Kent serigraphs: words of prayer (1968), handle with care (1964), mary does laugh (1964), that they may have life (1964) ©2021 Estate of Corita Kent / Immaculate Heart Community / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
FOR SISTER MARY CORITA, the supermarket parking lot in Hollywood she walked through each day to get to her art studio was filled with “sources.” Grocery advertisements, power lines, cracks in the asphalt, songs from car radios—all of these, to her, were “points of departure” that, when examined in a new way, tell us something about ourselves and God. “There is no line where art stops and life begins,” she wrote.
Corita Kent, a Catholic sister described by Artnet as “the pop art nun who combined Warhol with social justice,” delighted in Los Angeles’ chaotic 1960s cityscape. Her serigraphs (silk-screen prints) wrestle with injustice, racism, poverty, war, God, peace, and love in bursting neon and fluorescent lettering, transforming popular advertisements and songs into statements of hope.
“To create is to relate,” Kent wrote in Footnotes and Headlines. “We trust in the artist in everybody. It seems that perhaps there is nothing unholy, nothing unrelated.”
“She broke barriers her whole life, but always with joy,” Nellie Scott, director of the Corita Art Center, told Sojourners. “People often call her the joyous revolutionary.”
Kent was born in Iowa in 1918 and raised in a large Catholic family. Her family moved to Hollywood when she was young, and at age 18, Kent joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who ran the high school she attended. She went on to teach art at Immaculate Heart College, becoming head of the art department in 1964.
The changes going on in both the art world and Catholicism excited and inspired Kent. In 1962, the year that Pope John XXIII convened Vatican II, Kent saw the first exhibit of Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” paintings and dove into the world of pop art. “New ideas are bursting all around and all this comes into you and is changed by you,” she wrote in Learning by Heart.
Print about John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII incorporates the Sunkist company logo. RNS photo by Patti Jette Hanley
Combining images and words from advertising, pop culture, and religion, the bold graphic art of Sister Mary Corita was as deeply representative of the spirit of the 1960s as it was ubiquitous in church basements, dorm rooms. and urban communes of people involved in the struggle for civil rights and the campaign to end the Vietnam War.
In today's visual and graphically dominant popular culture, Corita's work — her bold typography, vivid colors, the use of ad logos and slogans — resonates with a new generation, attracted by what has been called "her festive involvement in the world'' and her interest in "blurring the lines between art and life.''
"Corita's art from the 1960s, which is based in advertising, has this great pop appeal to us today in our media-saturated culture,'' said Kathryn Wat of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.