come off it

Corita Kent was a groundbreaking theologian, artist, teacher, feminist, and activist for civil rights as well as anti-war causes. Her thousands of posters, murals and signature serigraphs reflect these combined passions for faith, art, education, social awareness and politics.

Working at the intersection of several powerful —and at times contradictory— religious, cultural and political influences, Kent, inspired by the works of Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987, American visual artist and leading figure in the pop art movement, considered the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century, through his explorations of the relationship between artistic expression, advertising and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s), began using popular culture as source material for her work in 1962.

Graphic designer, and art historian, Lorraine Wild (born 1953) says Sister Corita, as she was known, had already been experimenting with the silkscreen printing process when she saw a now legendary 1962 exhibition of Warhol’s work. The exhibition in question was most probably Warhol’s West Coast debut at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, where he showed the iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 32 pieces, each 51 x 41 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A.).

If the critics, of the time, frowned upon this, unorthodox, artistic approach in the case of (the queer outsider) Warhol, they must have really raised their eyebrows, in disbelief, when a Catholic nun followed suite. Ahead of the opening of Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent (travelling exhibition organized by Ian Berry, Dayton Director of the Tang Museum and Michael Duncan, independent curator and art critic, in collaboration with the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles) at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum in 2015, Ian Berry told David C. Barnett (‘A Nun Inspired By Warhol: The Forgotten Pop Art Of Sister Corita Kent’, 8 January 2015):

An ‘artist’ was from New York. They were a man; they were an epic, abstract painter. And she wore a habit — she just didn’t look like what the, sort of, movie version of an artist looked like. […] What she got from Warhol, clearly, was that there was this powerful imagery in pop culture that came out of advertising. And that if you just looked at it from a slightly different angle, you could read all these other things into it, and it already had a kind of power because the audience was familiar with it.

Kent’s screen prints often incorporated archetypical product 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 crumple the image, then re-photograph it. She often used grocery store signage, texts from scripture, newspaper clippings, popular song lyrics and quotes from various literary greats as the textual focal point of her work.

By creating juxtaposition between formally acknowledged, or respected, ‘art’ and the art Kent saw in her everyday world —at the supermarket, on a walk around Los Angeles, 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 Kent’s friend, theologian Harvey Cox (born 1929, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A., until his retirement in 2009).

Kent’s earliest work was mostly iconographic, drawing inspiration and material from the Bible and other religious sources. Her style is heavily text-based, with 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 also started becoming increasingly political.

Kent became one of the most popular graphic artists of the 1960s and ‘70s, and her images remain iconic symbols that address the larger questions and concerns of that turbulent time whilst continuing to influence many artists today. Kent’s silkscreens were, as mentioned above, once compared to Andy Warhol’s; her banners and posters were featured at civil rights and anti-war rallies in the 1960s and ‘70s; she made the covers of Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post and she, even, created a popular postage stamp (selling in numbers exceeding 700 million). Yet, until recently, Kent seems to have fallen through the cracks of art history.

This anomaly was somewhat corrected by the exhibition Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, which was shown in 2014 - 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A.; the Baker Museum, Naples, Florida, U.S.A.; the Andy Warhol Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. and the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, California, U.S.A. In conjunction with the exhibition the curators stated the following about Kent’s work process and legacy:

Her ingenious textual amalgams mix the secular and religious, popular culture and fine art, pain and hope, and include quotes from a range of literary and cultural figures such as Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, e. e. cummings, Langston Hughes, John Lennon, and Gertrude Stein. With an ear for language rivaling that of her contemporary Ed Ruscha, Corita proclaimed her upbeat theology in prints that re-purpose well-known advertising phrases of the time. […] For Corita, printmaking was a populist medium to communicate with the world around her, and her designs were widely disseminated through billboards, book jackets, illustrations, posters, gift cards, and T-shirts.

Compassion and activism characterised Kent’s art, as well as her life. Her posters and murals asked philosophical questions about racism, poverty, military brutalities in Vietnam and conflicts between radical and conservative positions inside the Catholic Church. As Kent, herself, explained:

If [printmaking] enables me to produce a quantity of original art for those who cannot afford to purchase high-priced art […] the distribution of these prints to everyday places of work pleases me, and I hope they will give people a lift. […] It is a huge danger to pretend awful things do not happen. But you need enough hope to keep on going. I am trying to make hope. And you have to grab it where you can.

Literature

This work is identified in the Corita Kent Archive as number 66-06.

(Eds.) Ian Berry & Michael Duncan, Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, 2013, p. 122.

Judy Peacock, Look, ‘Positive thinking’, 2017, p. 46-49; 48 (illustrated in colour).

Miscellaneous

Transcribed text:

Come off it - the big cheese

Copyright Firestorm Foundation