The Art of Corita Kent

I visited the Pasadena Museum of California Art yesterday and greatly enjoyed the works of Sister Corita Kent.  She was born Frances Elizabeth Kent in 1918 in Fort Dodge, Iowa and moved with her family to Southern California when she was a young girl.  She entered the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles after graduating from high school and became Sister Mary Corita.  She graduated from Immaculate Heart College and received her MA at U.S.C. in art history.  She taught elementary school children in British Columbia and then was brought to Immaculate Heart College to teach art in 1947.  She left the order in 1968 and moved to Boston where she died of cancer in 1986.  

She created hundreds of serigraph designs for posters and murals. She also designed the LOVE stamp for the U.S. Post Office.  She was active in human rights and anti war movements.

According to the posted descriptions, she was influenced by the POP ART movement, mixing bright, bold imagery with words taken from religious, and commercial sources.  She motivated her students to discover new ways of experiencing the world and to seek out revelation in the everyday. The motto at the IHC art department was "we have no art; we do everything as well as we can," a proverb borrowed from the Balinese.

"Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us.  To create means to relate.  The root meaning of the work art is to fit together and we all do this everyday.  Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating - whether it is a loaf of bread, a child, a day."  Corita Kent.

In addition to viewing the art, I watched a PBS video on her life and was moved by what she accomplished.  Her words still move many.

"Morning," 1976, Samsonite suitcase prototype

Corita and Buckminster Fuller, Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, 1965; Preparatory recto and verso studies for cover of Motive, 1966

Corita in Maine, 1975

Artwork for the Love Stamp.  Notice under the word Love, "is hard work." 1985

"Corita's move to Boston led to a distinct change in the style of her work...she shifted away from an art of direct social engagement toward quieter, more introspective statements...more contemplative and personal."

"...the circus alphabet include some of Corita's wittiest and most stylish works."

"Untitled watercolors," 1981-85. "In the early 1980's she began to paint watercolors outdoors throughout New England.  Corita relished the immediacy of watercolor in contrast with the complex process of printmaking.  Her last major series, the watercolors represent the final solitary phase of her lifelong engagement with the world."

"Chavez," 1969

"the lord is with three," 1952

"admirable exchange," 1951

Cover of Newsweek, December 25, 1967

Cover of The Saturday Evening Post, December 28, 1968-January 11, 1969,

Corita Kent died of cancer in 1986. "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." Corita's friend, theologian Harvey Cox.