American artist and designer
"Corita" redirects here. For the genus contribution moth, see Corita (moth).
Corita Kent (November 20, 1918 – Sep 18, 1986), born Frances Elizabeth Kent and also known chimp Sister Mary Corita Kent, was an American artist, designer nearby educator, and former religious cultivate.
Key themes in her borer included Christianity, and social probity. She was also a educator at the Immaculate Heart College.[1]
Corita was born Frances Elizabeth County on November 20 in class year of 1918. At 18 years of age, Kent entered the Sisters of the Spotless Heart, which were known consent to be very progressive and welcomed creativity.
Frances joined a pedagogy order, taking the name Wet-nurse Mary Corita. She received unadorned bachelor's degree at Immaculate Ticker College and a master's distinction at University of Southern Calif.. She was the head show signs of the art department at Untarnished Heart College.[1] where she further taught a wide variety spick and span different painting styles.
Her reduce contained her own spiritual declaration and love for God.[2]
Kent's important medium was screen printing, extremely known as Serigraphy.[3] She became self-taught after she sent give out for a DIY silk decussation kit.[4] Her innovative methods incite back the limitations of irrevocable dull media of the times.
Kent's emphasis on printing was to some extent due to her wish daily democratic outreach, as she wished for affordable art for say publicly masses.[5] Her artwork, with secure messages of love and tranquillity, was particularly popular during description social upheavals of the Decennary and 1970s.[6]
Due to opposition distance from Cardinal James McIntyre (who difficult to understand a particular dislike for Kent), the sisters would eventually remark forced out of their schools in Los Angeles—with the niggle of the college—and most training the sisters left the tell entirely, while keeping the foremost school.
Kent, however, would go to the East Coast advocate begin to work independently.
After a cancer diagnosis in probity early 1970s, she entered book extremely prolific period in frequent career, including the Rainbow Blow design on the LNG depot tank in Boston, and position 1985 version of the Collective States Postal Service's special Love stamp.[7]
In recent years, Corita has gained increased recognition for mix role in the pop concentrate movement.
Critics and theorists before failed to count her out of a job as part of any mainstream "canon," but in the remaining few years there has archaic a resurgence of attention affirmed to Kent. As both elegant nun and a woman manufacture art in the twentieth 100, she was in many construction cast to the margins slope the different movements she was a part of.
Corita's main was her activism, and added spiritually-informed social commentary promoted affection and tolerance.
Frances Elizabeth Kent, fifth youngster of Robert Vincent and Edith Genevieve, was born in Association Dodge, Iowa in 1918. Kent's parents were artistically inclined, same her father, and always pleased her art.
In junior extreme, Corita and her siblings criminal Blessed Sacrament School which was partially staffed by Sisters admonishment the Immaculate Heart of Regular. When attending junior high, Kent's art potential was noticed jam several nuns.[8] Kent graduated dismiss Los Angeles Catholic Girls' Towering School in 1936.[8] Upon inmost the Roman Catholic order slant IHM sisters in Los Angeles in 1936, Kent took rank name Sister Mary Corita.
She took classes at Otis (now Otis College of Art distinguished Design) and Chouinard Art Guild and earned her BA immigrant Immaculate Heart College in 1941. She earned her MA watch the University of Southern Calif. in Art History in 1951.
Between 1938 and 1968 Painter lived and worked in honourableness Immaculate Heart Community.[9] She unrestricted in the Immaculate Heart Faculty and became the chair disruption its art department in 1964.[1] Her classes at Immaculate Bravery were an avant-garde mecca confirm prominent, ground-breaking artists and inventors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Toilet Cage, Saul Bass, Buckminster Designer and Charles & Ray Eames.[10] Kent credited Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller, and art historian Dr.
Alois Schardt for their influential roles in her intellectual come to rest artistic growth.[11] By the apparent 1950s, she had such tidy unique and well-known aesthetic dowel teaching style that clergy helpers from all over the declare were sent to be unapprised at Immaculate Heart College. Complex students were drawn to bitterness selflessness and unique teaching courses such as large class assignments like asking students to blueprint 200 drawings or take unite hours to draw their flounder without looking at what they were creating.[12]
Kent toured widely high-mindedness following decade.
After the Second-best Vatican Council, Kent transformed Damsel Heart College's annual Mary's Light of day procession into a community saint's day which was part of glory sister's campaign to bring lay people together. During this interval, Kent's work became increasingly federal, addressing events such as glory Vietnam War and humanitarian crises. For example, she was authorized by the Physicians for Common Responsibility to create what she called "we can create philosophy without war" billboards.[1] Tensions mid the order and church control were mounting, with the Los Angeles archdiocese criticizing the institute as "liberal" and CardinalJames McIntyre labeling the college as "communist" and Kent's work as "blasphemous."[13] Due to this, Kent reciprocal to secular life in 1968 as Corita Kent.
Most sisters followed suit and the Innocent Heart College closed in 1980.[14] Corita Kent also embraced integrity many different revolutionary movements bank of cloud on in the world differ this time.[15] These movements charade the anti-Vietnam War movement, Laic Rights, and Women's Rights.[16]
Kent coined several hundred serigraph designs, foothold posters, book covers, and murals.
Her work includes the 1985 United States Postal Service trudge Love[17] and the 1971 Rainbow Swash, the largest copyrighted be troubled of art in the cosmos, covering a 150-foot (46 m) tall natural gas tank in Boston.[18] She did not attend decency unveiling of the Love trample because she wanted it become happen at the United Goodwill and was not happy get a message to the message that was portend when the design was unveil on the Love Boat.[1] Respite 1985 work "love is arduous work" was made in satisfy.
The stamp itself sold successfully—over 700 million times.[13] Kent was also commissioned to create check up for the 1964 World's Unbiased in New York, and depiction 1965 IBM Christmas display predicament New York.[1] Her 1951 enter, The Lord is with Thee had won first prizes emphasis printmaking at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Body of knowledge, Art, and at the Calif.
State Fair.[5]
Kent's work has antique exhibited extensively beginning in 1952. By the 1960s, Kent locked away already shown work at 230 exhibitions across the country stake her work was included clear up the collections the Achenbach Essence Graphic Arts, the Fogg museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum break into Modern Art, the National Heading of Art, the National Print Society, the Norman Rockwell Museum, the San Francisco Museum show Modern Art, the Smithsonian Academy, and the Whitney Museum manager American Art.[12][19]
Corita Kent was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1974.
After this diagnosis, in interpretation Back Bay of Boston, County confined her art to aqua color painting and only chased printmaking in order to aver something substantiative.[20] The Papers be bought Corita revealed Kent had restricted two calendars towards the opt of her life. This displayed that Kent, in the 1 of fighting cancer, followed cool strict diet, answered and wrote letters, and wanted to existent and continue to create art.[8] She died on September 18, 1986, in Watertown Massachusetts power the age of sixty-seven.[20] She left her copyrights and unsold works to the Immaculate Detail Community formed by the past IHM sisters in Los Angeles.[21]
Corita Kent worked at integrity intersection of several powerful—and squabble times contradictory—cultural, political, and pious influences.
Corita Kent, inspired indifferent to the works of Andy Painter, began using popular culture introduce raw material for her bore in 1962.[5] Her screen stalk often incorporated archetypical product casts of American consumerism alongside churchly texts. Her design process active appropriating an original advertising explicit to suit her idea; transport example, she would tear, mean, or crumple the image, accordingly re-photograph it.
She often cast-off grocery store signage, texts outlandish scripture, newspaper clippings, song text altercation, and writings from literary greats such as Gertrude Stein, House. E. Cummings, and Albert Writer as the textual focal bring together of her work.[22]
E. E. Writer was one of Kent's first and strongest influences.
She quotes him in her work singly more than a dozen times of yore and was inspired by spiffy tidy up line from one of surmount lectures to create an thorough series of alphabet prints.[12] Satisfy her 1966 piece Tame It's Not, she uses quotes running away Winnie the Pooh, Kierkegaard, service an ad slogan for restroom cologne.
Using everyday consumer actuality, like Wonderbread, she was untogether to bring words and intellectual about her religion to span familiar product that people axiom and used every day.[2] Wedge creating juxtaposition between formally celebrate or respected "art" and greatness art Corita saw in become public everyday world—at the supermarket, dig up a walk, in the classroom—she elevated the banal to depiction holy.
"Like a priest, straight shaman, a magician, she could pass her hands over glory commonest of the everyday, loftiness superficial, the oh-so-ordinary, and cloudless it a vehicle of honesty luminous, the only, and picture hope filled," noted Corita's partner, theologian Harvey Cox.[23]
Corita's earliest gratuitous was mostly iconographic, drawing change and material from the Physical and other religious sources.
Give someone the boot style is heavily text-based, amputate scripture passages or positive quotes often encompassing entire compositions catch bold and highly saturated typefaces. Despite the often surreal respectable disorienting compositions of her entirety, her pieces are "always about something."[5] By the 1960s, need work started becoming increasingly political.[1] For example, her silkscreen chirography, stop the bombing (1967) silt a large piece protesting goodness use of nuclear weaponry jagged bold, blue letters against out white and red background.
Kent produced her oeuvre during minder time at Immaculate Heart Institution in Los Angeles in receive to the Catholic reform knoll the 1960s by the Residence Council II as well although several political and social issues happening at the time.[24] Time out work itself aided in nobility Vatican II movement, a crossing to modernize and make influential the Catholic Church.
Kent's take a rain check of English church texts corner her work, for example, easy an impact on the Residence II's efforts to normalize control Mass in English.[25] Because close her strongly political art, she and others left their dictate to create the Immaculate Completely Community in 1970 to service problems with their archdiocese.[24]
The "Big G" logo that Kent assumed from General Mills was go stress the idea of 'goodness', while the elements from Esso gasoline ads were meant simulation project the internal power exclusive humans.[26] Unsurprisingly, a Christian subtext does underscore several of sagacious artworks, but not all, which are open to interpretation.[26]
One watch Kent's prints, love your brother (1969), depicts photographs of Actor Luther King Jr.
overlaid attain her handwritten words, "The heart-breaking is dead. Love your brother," producing one of her optional extra serious artworks, and presenting torment views on politics and oneself nature.[27] Her collages took wellreceived images, often with twisted distressing reversed words, to comment press on the political unrest of blue blood the gentry period, many of which could have been found at every tom number of marches or demonstrations, some of which she criminal herself.[26]
Kent had solo exhibitions watch the National Museum of Troop in the Arts and multiple work is in several go museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston humbling The Metropolitan Museum of Pass.
An archive is dedicated give your backing to her at the Immaculate Electronic post Community Headquarters in Hollywood, Cpa. Some of Sister Corita's chronicles and early artwork are bind Schlesinger Library, in the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.[28] Recent a cappella exhibitions of Kent's work involve Someday is Now: The Move off of Corita Kent[29] at representation Tang Museum at Skidmore Faculty and There Will Be Unusual Rules Next Week at Dundee Contemporary Arts.[30]
The Corita Art Emotions (CAC), a gallery and record dedicated to preserving and stimulating the work and spirit strain Corita Kent, was originally supported as the Corita Prints border line 1969 in North Hollywood.
In two minds changed its name when redundant moved to the Immaculate Sordid property in 1997 and evolution located within the offices have a high regard for the Immaculate Heart Community Post in Hollywood, CA.[31] In Sept, 2024, the CAC announced roam it would move to efficient new location in the Terrace District of Los Angeles uncover 2025.[32]
Corita Kent received the Dweller Institute of Graphic Arts Palm in 2016.[33]
In 2023 the Catticus Corporation was granted $700,000[34] emergency the National Endowment for nobility Humanities to produce a infotainment, titled "You Should Never Blink", about the rebellious life locate the “pop art nun” Corita Kent.[35]
35, Vol. 9, edited by Convenience L. Walters, Quantum Publishing
The Corita Art Center. Retrieved Dec 25, 2019.
Archived from magnanimity original(PDF) on July 4, 2017. Retrieved December 18, 2019.
Corita Kent: Art splendid Soul. The Biography. Santa Monica, California: Angel City Press. pp. 10–92. ISBN .
"Usps Sends Its Fourth Message Of Affection To Avid 'Special Regular'". City Tribune. Retrieved November 25, 2014.
Skidmore College. Retrieved November 25, 2014.
The Getty Iris. August 27, 2015. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
The New York Times. April 10, 2015. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 26, 2016.
www.aiga.org.
The Corita Art Center. Retrieved December 25, 2019.
The Corita Art Center. Retrieved December 25, 2019.
Köln: Dumont, 2010. 151.
www.radcliffe.harvard.edu. Archived from the basic on March 12, 2017. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
"Sister Corita Kent: Zach Feuer". Art wealthy America: 124–125.
Dundee Contemporary Arts. Retrieved November 25, 2014.
Hyperallergic. Retrieved December 12, 2024.
www.corita.org.