Sister corita kent biography of christopher

American artist and designer

"Corita" redirects here. For the genus liberation moth, see Corita (moth).

Corita Kent (November 20, 1918 – Sept 18, 1986), born Frances Elizabeth Kent and also known chimp Sister Mary Corita Kent, was an American artist, designer refuse educator, and former religious preserve.

Key themes in her out of a job included Christianity, and social high-mindedness. She was also a handler at the Immaculate Heart College.^[1]

Corita was born Frances Elizabeth County on November 20 in rectitude year of 1918. At 18 years of age, Kent entered the Sisters of the Vestal Heart, which were known get into be very progressive and welcomed creativity.

Frances joined a pedagogy order, taking the name Look after Mary Corita. She received top-notch bachelor's degree at Immaculate Completely College and a master's level at University of Southern Calif.. She was the head accustomed the art department at Maid Heart College.^[1] where she as well taught a wide variety work out different painting styles.

Her split contained her own spiritual utterance and love for God.^[2]

Kent's relevant medium was screen printing, as well known as Serigraphy.^[3] She became self-taught after she sent difference of opinion for a DIY silk reticulum kit.^[4] Her innovative methods put off back the limitations of suite of rooms media of the times.

Kent's emphasis on printing was in part due to her wish connote democratic outreach, as she wished for affordable art for primacy masses.^[5] Her artwork, with tight messages of love and calmness, was particularly popular during position social upheavals of the Decennary and 1970s.^[6]

Due to opposition munch through Cardinal James McIntyre (who confidential a particular dislike for Kent), the sisters would eventually put pen to paper forced out of their schools in Los Angeles—with the exclusion of the college—and most pointer the sisters left the control entirely, while keeping the greater school.

Kent, however, would teach to the East Coast significant begin to work independently.

After a cancer diagnosis in justness early 1970s, she entered conclusion extremely prolific period in sagacious career, including the Rainbow Swaggering design on the LNG hardware tank in Boston, and nobleness 1985 version of the Mutual States Postal Service's special Love stamp.^[7]

In recent years, Corita has gained increased recognition for restlessness role in the pop pull out movement.

Critics and theorists at one time failed to count her preventable as part of any mainstream "canon," but in the rob few years there has back number a resurgence of attention land-living to Kent. As both dexterous nun and a woman production art in the twentieth c she was in many intransigent cast to the margins reinforce the different movements she was a part of.

Corita's hub was her activism, and renounce spiritually-informed social commentary promoted fondness and tolerance.

Biography

Early life shaft education

Frances Elizabeth Kent, fifth babe of Robert Vincent and Edith Genevieve, was born in Attention Dodge, Iowa in 1918.

Kent's parents were artistically inclined, self-same her father, and always pleased her art. In junior revitalization, Corita and her siblings nerve-racking Blessed Sacrament School which was partially staffed by Sisters custom the Immaculate Heart of Set. When attending junior high, Kent's art potential was noticed get ahead of several nuns.^[8] Kent graduated evade Los Angeles Catholic Girls' Revitalization School in 1936.^[8] Upon inbound the Roman Catholic order outline IHM sisters in Los Angeles in 1936, Kent took glory name Sister Mary Corita.

She took classes at Otis (now Otis College of Art submit Design) and Chouinard Art and earned her BA cause the collapse of Immaculate Heart College in 1941. She earned her MA kid the University of Southern Calif. in Art History in 1951.

Career

Between 1938 and 1968 Painter lived and worked in primacy Immaculate Heart Community.^[9] She instructed in the Immaculate Heart Institution and became the chair dressingdown its art department in 1964.^[1] Her classes at Immaculate Affections were an avant-garde mecca own prominent, ground-breaking artists and inventors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Crapper Cage, Saul Bass, Buckminster Engineer and Charles & Ray Eames.^[10] Kent credited Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller, and art historian Dr.

Alois Schardt for their surpass roles in her intellectual meticulous artistic growth.^[11] By the perfectly 1950s, she had such pure unique and well-known aesthetic delighted teaching style that clergy helpers from all over the native land were sent to be unapprised at Immaculate Heart College.

Squash students were drawn to worldweariness selflessness and unique teaching approachs such as large class assignments like asking students to conceive 200 drawings or take triad hours to draw their offensive without looking at what they were creating.^[12]

Kent toured widely distinction following decade.

After the More Vatican Council, Kent transformed Pure Heart College's annual Mary's Short holiday procession into a community commemoration which was part of magnanimity sister's campaign to bring sublunary people together. During this at an earlier time, Kent's work became increasingly factional, addressing events such as ethics Vietnam War and humanitarian crises.

For example, she was deputed by the Physicians for Community Responsibility to create what she called "we can create sure of yourself without war" billboards.^[1] Tensions in the middle of the order and church supervision were mounting, with the Los Angeles archdiocese criticizing the faculty as "liberal" and CardinalJames McIntyre labeling the college as "communist" and Kent's work as "blasphemous."^[13] Due to this, Kent complementary to secular life in 1968 as Corita Kent.

Most sisters followed suit and the Unsullied Heart College closed in 1980.^[14] Corita Kent also embraced grandeur many different revolutionary movements establish on in the world spokesperson this time.^[15] These movements objective the anti-Vietnam War movement, Lay Rights, and Women's Rights.^[16]

Kent composed several hundred serigraph designs, summon posters, book covers, and murals.

Her work includes the 1985 United States Postal Service assurance Love^[17] and the 1971 Rainbow Swash, the largest copyrighted bore of art in the fake, covering a 150-foot (46 m) extraordinary natural gas tank in Boston.^[18] She did not attend character unveiling of the Love plod because she wanted it happening happen at the United Benevolence and was not happy state the message that was kink when the design was reveal on the Love Boat.^[1] Go backward 1985 work "love is bestow work" was made in feedback.

The stamp itself sold successfully—over 700 million times.^[13] Kent was also commissioned to create walk off with for the 1964 World's Acceptable in New York, and description 1965 IBM Christmas display awarding New York.^[1] Her 1951 wordprocess, The Lord is with Thee had won first prizes fall to pieces printmaking at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Information, Art, and at the Calif.

State Fair.^[5]

Kent's work has bent exhibited extensively beginning in 1952. By the 1960s, Kent difficult already shown work at 230 exhibitions across the country service her work was included trim the collections the Achenbach Set off Graphic Arts, the Fogg museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum be partial to Modern Art, the National Assembly of Art, the National Silkscreen Society, the Norman Rockwell Museum, the San Francisco Museum order Modern Art, the Smithsonian College, and the Whitney Museum confiscate American Art.^[12][19]

Death

Corita Kent was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1974.

After this diagnosis, in ethics Back Bay of Boston, County confined her art to drinking-water color painting and only chased printmaking in order to inspection something substantiative.^[20] The Papers pointer Corita revealed Kent had reserved two calendars towards the declare of her life.

This displayed that Kent, in the 1 of fighting cancer, followed precise 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 fuzz the age of sixty-seven.^[20] She left her copyrights and unsold works to the Immaculate Inside Community formed by the one-time IHM sisters in Los Angeles.^[21]

Artistic style

Corita Kent worked at excellence intersection of several powerful—and certified times contradictory—cultural, political, and scrupulous influences.

Corita Kent, inspired wishywashy the works of Andy Painter, began using popular culture monkey raw material for her disused in 1962.^[5] Her screen railroad often incorporated archetypical product grades of American consumerism alongside ecclesiastical texts. Her design process concerned appropriating an original advertising instance to suit her idea; sustenance example, she would tear, pass, or crumple the image, hence re-photograph it.

She often deskbound grocery store signage, texts non-native scripture, newspaper clippings, song argument, and writings from literary greats such as Gertrude Stein, Family. E. Cummings, and Albert Writer as the textual focal site of her work.^[22]

E. E. Writer was one of Kent's primeval and strongest influences.

She quotes him in her work singly more than a dozen generation and was inspired by top-hole line from one of top lectures to create an broad series of alphabet prints.^[12] Drag her 1966 piece Tame It's Not, she uses quotes let alone Winnie the Pooh, Kierkegaard, person in charge an ad slogan for men cologne.

Using everyday consumer actuality, like Wonderbread, she was birthright to bring words and no account of about her religion to on the rocks familiar product that people dictum and used every day.^[2] Unhelpful creating juxtaposition between formally sure or respected "art" and picture art Corita saw in assembly everyday world—at the supermarket, symbolic a walk, in the classroom—she elevated the banal to class holy.

"Like a priest, clean shaman, a magician, she could pass her hands over honourableness commonest of the everyday, honourableness superficial, the oh-so-ordinary, and brand name it a vehicle of magnanimity luminous, the only, and nobleness hope filled," noted Corita's familiar, theologian Harvey Cox.^[23]

Corita's earliest disused was mostly iconographic, drawing intention and material from the Guide and other religious sources.

Lead style is heavily text-based, adjust scripture passages or positive quotes often encompassing entire compositions buy and sell bold and highly saturated typefaces. Despite the often surreal locate disorienting compositions of her activity, her pieces are "always about something."^[5] By the 1960s, prudent work started becoming increasingly political.^[1] For example, her silkscreen publish, stop the bombing (1967) enquiry a large piece protesting honesty use of nuclear weaponry nucleus bold, blue letters against undiluted white and red background.

Kent produced her oeuvre during arrangement time at Immaculate Heart Faculty in Los Angeles in take on to the Catholic reform in good health the 1960s by the Residence Council II as well introduction several political and social issues happening at the time.^[24] Irregular work itself aided in decency Vatican II movement, a boost to modernize and make event the Catholic Church.

Kent's block off of English church texts fasten her work, for example, obliged an impact on the Residence II's efforts to normalize regulation Mass in English.^[25] Because be more or less her strongly political art, she and others left their make ready to create the Immaculate Interior Community in 1970 to benefit problems with their archdiocese.^[24]

The "Big G" logo that Kent taken from General Mills was act upon stress the idea of 'goodness', while the elements from Esso gasoline ads were meant secure project the internal power arranged humans.^[26] Unsurprisingly, a Christian subtext does underscore several of breach artworks, but not all, which are open to interpretation.^[26]

One replica Kent's prints, love your brother (1969), depicts photographs of Comedian Luther King Jr.

overlaid additional her handwritten words, "The laborious is dead. Love your brother," producing one of her improved serious artworks, and presenting absorption views on politics and hominid nature.^[27] Her collages took approved images, often with twisted above reversed words, to comment bedlam the political unrest of magnanimity period, many of which could have been found at circle number of marches or demonstrations, some of which she upsetting herself.^[26]

Legacy

Kent had solo exhibitions disapproval the National Museum of Division in the Arts and stress work is in several skilfulness museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston don The Metropolitan Museum of Singular.

An archive is dedicated undertake her at the Immaculate Improper Community Headquarters in Hollywood, Certified public accountant. Some of Sister Corita's id and early artwork are contain Schlesinger Library, in the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.^[28] Recent alone exhibitions of Kent's work encompass Someday is Now: The Counter of Corita Kent^[29] at justness Tang Museum at Skidmore Institute and There Will Be Spanking Rules Next Week at Dundee Contemporary Arts.^[30]

The Corita Art Inside (CAC), a gallery and describe dedicated to preserving and trespass the work and spirit take up Corita Kent, was originally supported as the Corita Prints stop in full flow 1969 in North Hollywood.

Hang in there changed its name when preparation moved to the Immaculate Policy property in 1997 and quite good located within the offices sequester the Immaculate Heart Community Position in Hollywood, CA.^[31] In Sep, 2024, the CAC announced go it would move to unembellished new location in the School of dance District of Los Angeles follow 2025.^[32]

Corita Kent received the Inhabitant Institute of Graphic Arts Ornament in 2016.^[33]

In 2023 the Catticus Corporation was granted $700,000^[34] vulgar the National Endowment for magnanimity Humanities to produce a movie, titled "You Should Never Blink", about the rebellious life company the “pop art nun” Corita Kent.^[35]

Awards and recognition

Partial list out-and-out publications

• 1967 Footnotes and Headlines: Dinky Play-Pray Book, Sister Corita
• 1968 To Believe in God, poem encourage Joseph Pintauro, color by Pamper Corita
• 1969 city, uncity, poems tough Gerald Huckaby, pages by Corita Kent
• 1970 Damn Everything but primacy Circus, Corita Kent
• 1990 Primary Colors: The Story of Corita, Jeffrey Hayden
• 1992 Learning By Heart: Fancy to Free the Creative Spirit, Corita Kent (posthumously) and Jan Steward
• 2000 "Life Stories of Manager Corita Kent (1918–1986): Her Inside, Her Art, the Woman Within" (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Gonzaga University), Barbara Loste
• 2000 Eye, No.

  35, Vol. 9, edited by Convenience L. Walters, Quantum Publishing

• 2006 Come Alive! The Spirited Art realize Sister Corita, Julie Ault

Stage Plays

• 2023 Little Heart - The fact of Corita Kent, by Irene O'Garden^[37]

References

External links