Corita Kent

Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita, was an American artist and former religious sister working as a teacher at the Immaculate Heart College (1905–1981, a private Catholic college located in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. The college offered various courses including art and religious education studies). Key themes in her work included Christianity and social justice. Kent’s primary medium was silkscreen printing, also known as serigraphy. She became self-taught, after having sent away for a DIY silk screening kit, around the time she was finishing her graduate degree. Considering it a good method to teach to her students, many of whom were pre-service teachers, the technique also appealed to Kent for another important reason: she wanted her art to be affordable, as well as widely available, and serigraphy allows for the production of multiple works. Her innovative methods pushed back the limitations of two-dimensional media of the times and her artwork, with its messages of love and peace, was particularly popular during the radical social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Kent was named ‘Woman of the year’ by LA Times (1966), grazed the cover of Newsweek (1967) and received the American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal (2016).

In recent years, Kent has gained increased recognition for her role in the pop art movement. Critics and art historians 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 20th century, she was in many ways cast to the margins of the different movements she was a part of. Kent’s art was her activism, and her spiritually-informed social commentary promoted love and tolerance.

Frances Elizabeth Kent was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, U.S.A. in 1918. Kent’s parents were artistically inclined and always encouraged her art. At 18 years of age, Kent entered the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart (Catholic religious teaching institute for women), which were known to be very progressive and welcomed creativity. Joining a teaching order she received a bachelor’s degree at Immaculate Heart College (1941) and, later, a master’s degree (Art History) at University of Southern California (1951).

Between 1938 and 1968 Kent lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart Community, where she taught in the Immaculate Heart College and became the chair of its art department in 1964. 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.

Kent created several hundred serigraph designs for posters, book covers and murals. Her 1952 print, the lord is with thee (serigraph, 56 x 39 cm) won first prizes in printmaking at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science & Art and the California State Fair. Kent was commissioned to create work for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and the 1965 IBM Christmas display in New York, as well as Rainbow Swash, the largest copyrighted work of art in the world (back then), covering a 150-foot (46 m) high natural gas tank in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. (highly visible from daily commuters’ drives on Interstate 93, it is considered one of the major landmarks of Boston, akin to the Boston Citgo sign). Other commissioned works include the 1985 version of the United States Postal Service’s special Love stamp (selling more than 700 million copies…).

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 of the Achenbach Foundation Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California, U.S.A.; the Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.; the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, NY, U.S.A.; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the National Seriegraph Society; the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, U.S.A.; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Corita Kent was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1974. After this diagnosis Kent confined her art to water colour painting and only pursued printmaking in order to say something substantiative. Kent died on September 18, 1986, in Watertown Massachusetts at the age of sixty-seven.

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