Corita Kent (1918-1986) usually wore a nun’s uniform of black and white, but the art she created was full of color; bright, bold, and transformative in the avant-garde artist community.
Corita Kent (1918-1986) usually wore a nun’s uniform of black and white, but the art she created was full of color; bright, bold, and transformative in the avant-garde artist community.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica.
This month, we’re talking about visionaries.
The artist we’re talking about today usually wore a nun’s uniform of black and white. But the art she created was full of color, bright, bold, and transformative in the avant-garde artist community. Let’s talk about Corita Kent.
In November 1918, Corita was born Frances Kent into a large, pious Catholic family. Corita grew up in Hollywood, and from a young age, she showed a remarkable artistic gift. She was constantly drawing, and helped make posters at school.
Corita attended a Catholic high school. When she graduated in 1936, she became a novice nun, and took the name Sister Mary Corita. She also enrolled as a student at Immaculate Heart College.
Although Immaculate Heart was a Catholic college, Corita was schooled in the liberal arts, and steeped in the avant-garde art movement happening at the time. She studied art, and arts education.
In 1941, Corita graduated, and started a career as a teacher. Then, in 1947, she began pursuing a masters in art history at the University of Southern California. There, she learned silk screen printing - a technique where artists make a print by pressing ink through a mesh silk-screen onto a canvas.
In 1952, a year after completing her master’s degree, Corita won first prize in both the Los Angeles County Print Competition and the California State Fair for her work titled ‘The Lord Is With Thee’.
The print mixed teal and pink, mauve and chartreuse. The Virgin Mary is surrounded by saints, kings, and camels -- mixing modern brightness, color, and composition with traditional themes.
After that first success, her artistic career began in full force. As Corita made more prints, she began to become more experimental. She started adding text, mimicking the posters she used to make in elementary school.
Then, in 1962, Corita saw an Andy Warhol exhibition, which featured his famous soup can paintings. Later, she said that coming home from that exhibit, “[she] saw everything like Andy Warhol.”
That exhibition was a turning point in Corita’s artistic career. Later that year, Corita made her first pop print - titled wonderbread. It was a simple, stripped down silkscreen print of twelve brightly colored circles, all slightly different shapes and sizes. The only hint at the painting's meaning was the title. The oval shapes resembled communion wafers, the implication being that the body of Christ was the most ‘wondrous’ bread.
Throughout the 1960’s, Corita created prints that pushed the boundaries of the art world. Her prints often mixed symbols from the consumer world with religious and philosophical texts. And Corita’s work quickly made her a pillar in the LA art scene. Artists flocked to her - like the composer John Cage, the architect Buckminster Fuller, and the designer Charles Eames.
In 1964, Corita became the head of her college’s art department. Her classrooms were frenetic and full of energy - when you walked in, there would sometimes be multiple movies playing on the walls at the same time, rock music blaring from speakers, and people creating big, complex collaborative artistic projects.
Corita saw her art and her teaching as a way to modernize the Catholic church - and she made such a mark that in 1967 she was featured on the cover of Newsweek as The Nun: Going Modern.
But her work was not without detractors. The Archbishop of Los Angeles was a staunch traditionalist, and often criticized Corita and her entire order of nuns for their art and liberal views.
By 1968, the criticism had begun to take a toll on Corita. She took a sabbatical in Cape Cod, and after it was over, she decided to leave the convent. She joined a larger wave of nuns who were leaving the order, and together, they established a broader, more inclusive religious community.
At the age of 50, Corita was living alone in Boston, a departure from convent life. But Corita continued her art practice, and her work became even more radical. Her prints pushed for civil rights, protested the Vietnam War, and illustrated themes of poverty, hunger, and race.
She also began designing art for large institutions. Corita painted the Rainbow Swash for the Boston Gas Company’s tanks, and she designed the love postage stamp for the US postal authority. More than 700 million stamps were made with her design.
In 1974, Corita was diagnosed with cancer. Afterwards, her work changed, reflecting her experience with illness. Her paintings became more muted and introspective, and she began producing nature-inspired watercolors -- of flowers and landscapes.
Corita died in 1986. When she was alive, her work never quite made it into the mainstream. But in the last decade, her work gained more prominence, and has been exhibited across the world.
Corita’s art transformed advertising slogans into resonant reflections on morality, spirituality, and human rights - and her work stands out as an important contribution to the pop art movement.
All month, we’re honoring incredible, artistic visionaries.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!