Earlier this month, while passing through the corridor of our Center for Spirituality and Social Justice at St. Catherine University, I was brought to an abrupt halt by a previously overlooked framed print of Corita Kent’s serigraph titled “Loud and Clear.” Located to the right of the bold words, a quote from Camus was scribbled:
“What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the simplest man.”
Corita’s print and these words reverberated as I had just left Derham Hall, the administration building where I was with students whose organized sit-in brought adamant attention to the desperate need for a humanitarian resolution in the Middle East. The students were challenging administrators to speak out and make a collective stance on behalf of the University. Viewing this work of art and reading the words reminded me that artists like Corita Kent continue to speak to us loud and clear and inspire ways to act amid adversity and uncertainty.
For me, Corita has serendipitously appeared and reappeared throughout my life. While an undergraduate studio art major experimenting with printmaking, I found her distinct silkscreens captivating and emboldened with social content. The inclusive and innovative pedagogy she espoused in the book she co-wrote with Jan Steward, Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit, resonated with me as a novice art educator aspiring to move beyond the conventions of “traditional” teaching. Her Rules for Students and Teachers,challenge my role as “educator,” promote the blurred boundaries of my interdisciplinary teaching, and expand the ideas of contextual learning. Random opportunities to view her work in-person or on-line fuel my own desires to explore new ways art, theology, and spirituality can invigorate justice. Memorable encounters with her art include the traveling retrospective exhibition and catalogue by the same name, Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent and most recently reading about the inclusion of her work in the 2024 Venice Biennale’s Vatican Pavilion under the exhibit titled “With My Eyes.”
Frances Elizabeth Kent was born in 1918 and took the name of Sister Mary Corita when she entered the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) in Los Angeles in 1936 at the age 18. With a degree in Art History from the University of Southern California and an introductory course in printmaking, Corita entered the classroom and, throughout the 1950s and 60s, ascended to became a dedicated, innovative, and beloved art teacher and ultimately the director of the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College. In addition to her unconventional pedagogy and commitment to her studio practice, she worked with her students to organize and choreograph the free-spirited May Day Happenings celebrating Mary at Immaculate Heart. All this caught the attention and ire of Los Angeles Cardinal James Francis McIntyre (1886-1979) who was scrutinizing the activities of the Sisters in their efforts to respond to the renewal and reforms inspired by Vatican II. Corita’s art became a flashpoint of criticism for the Cardinal. In a message to Mother Regina McPartlin (1904-1993), the IHM congregational leader at the time, McIntyre critiqued Corita’s approach: “Figures that are burdened with a large element of uncertainty, as well as of the grotesque, are disturbing to pious souls, not excluding Religious.” (R. Pacatte, 74) McIntyre’s relentless and ultraconservative vigilance over what he deemed liberal attitudes, ultimately led to the removal of the Sisters’ canonical status within the Church. This in turn spurred their formation of the Immaculate Heart Community in 1970.
The criticism and the strain experienced by her religious community under the Cardinal’s imposed restraints, in addition to her exhausting schedule or teaching, exhibiting, and speaking, all contributed to Corita’s request in 1968 for a sabbatical which she took on the east coast. Over that year, she requested a dispensation from her vows and ultimately discerned to leave the Order, and as some scholars note, left the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, throughout her life, her ties to the IHM community endured and Corita remained a consummate seeker. Her art continued to be imbued with deep explorations into themes of suffering, pain, loneliness, joy, hope, love, and justice. I believe Corita continues to have something to say to activist artists and to those who minister and lead as ritual artists – particularly to those who feel the agitation of adversity and uncertainty, today. Here’s some ways I see it.
Beginning in the mid 1950s, Corita’s unique style of art exploded into the public arena with a juxtaposition of scrambled words, shapes, and colors that drew attention to the dissonant realities of the day. However, like performative utterances, her visual and distilled poetic quips cut through the “noise” to alert people to the things they might have missed. She understood that in a visually saturated and mass media-centered culture, the semiotics of words and graphics had power to alert, agitate and clarify. Her art also coincided with and energized the activist political agenda of the 1960s and 1970s. Her use of journalistic photography in her serigraphs contributed to the contentious conversations of the day. Her art provided a call and provoked a response while raising awareness about poverty, racism, and the most strident of anti-war efforts.
Secondly, Corita’s art pushed beyond the rubrics of art conventions and instead privileged relevance. She celebrated mundane labels like “Wonder Bread” and familiar slogans like “Power Up.” She combined words and image by making the ordinary refreshingly novel using qualities of abstraction, with letters turned upside down and sideways. The results were images that did not sedate, instead they beckoned curiosity, engagement, response, and wonder. Corita recognized that wonder and uncertainty were constituents that awakened possibilities for being shaken and open. These first steps diminished the fear of being moved or changing perspectives. Art nurtured the sacramental imagination and was a conduit for acknowledging the incarnational in new ways.
Ultimately, for Corita art brought the secular and religious together. “I think we have to have the awareness that everything is sacred,” she said, “and when we lose that awareness, we lose connection with the whole, with the cosmos. Art is one of the means amid adversity of reestablishing the connection. A picture may be a symbol for the whole if we look at it as a small cosmos.” (C. Kent, 37) Always alert to her context, she continued, “In this shrinking world, and with our growing sensitivity to a global consciousness and a greater realization of how interconnected everything is, it becomes for the artist intensely difficult, almost impossible, for even a small-size hint to be made. But we can look on it as a challenge. And we can build up our hope by making, by creating.” (C. Kent, 38)
In 1974 Corita was diagnosed with cancer. She continued to work for another decade creating works of art that evoked the sacred in subtle and celebratory ways. The contemplative simplicity of her final works drew on an interior life that recalled the themes and reiterated the words she carried close to her heart throughout her life:
“There is no consciousness without pain;” “We live in one world and each act of ours affects the whole;” “To believe in God is to know that all the rules will be fair and that there will be wonderful surprises;” “The ground work doesn’t show till one day;” “Love is hard work;” and her final piece, “Yes, we can.”
Corita died on September 18, 1986. Despite the ephemeral quality of this last piece she created, her art resounds “loud and clear” in our uncertain and challenging times.
Dr. Rebecca Berru Davis is Assistant Professor of Theology at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN. She received her degree from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA where her dissertation focused on women artists of the Liturgical Movement in the United States. Rebecca’s ongoing research, writing, and curatorial projects are focused on the intersection of art, faith, and justice to better understand the spiritual and religious expressions and lived faith practices of those located on the margins of society. Her essays have been included in U.S. Catholic Historian, the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theologies and the Handbook of Women’s Studies in Religion.
Image Loud and Clear used with permission. Courtesy of the St. Catherine University Fine Art Collection.
Sources:
Berry, Ian and Michael Duncan, eds., Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, Del Monico Books, 2013.
Kent, Corita, “The Artist as Social Activist Amid Adversity: How the Job is Done,” in Sacred Dimensions of Women’s Experience, Elizabeth Dodson Gray, ed., Roundtable Press, 1988. (37-39)
Kent, Corita, “Philosophy of Art Education,” in Catholic Art Education: The New Trends: The Proceedings of the Workshop on New Trends in Catholic Art Education, conducted by the Catholic University of America, June 13-June 24,1958. Esther Newport, ed. Reprinted in Berry and Duncan, Someday is Now (252-253).
Pacatte, Rose, Corita Kent: Gentle Revolutionary of the Heart, Liturgical Press, 2017.