Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986), born Francis Elizabeth Kent, entered the Los Angeles-based order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 at the age of eighteen, taking the name Mary Corita. She studied art and art history, and began teaching at Immaculate Heart College in 1947.

Corita started experimenting with what would become her lifelong artistic medium, serigraphy—also called screenprinting—sometime before 1951. The subject matter of her early prints is distinctly religious, and they share stylistic traits such as flattened and stylized figuration and layered colors. Her work would take a radical turn around 1962, however, as she embraced the medium’s commercial roots and adopted the look—the crisp lines and bright, unmixed colors—of commercial products and their packaging. She also appropriated the language of popular culture. The earlier religious and social content was still present, but was now expressed in the stripped down slogans and bold typography of advertising, suggesting the layered meaning simple words could take on when used in new contexts.

Corita’s primary vocation was not as artist, but as teacher, and she carried the lessons she shared with students into her own art practice. The ten rules Corita outlined for the IHC Art Department are full of her own relentless calls to “work” and “be self disciplined” but also reflect a profound sense of the importance of egalitarian exchanges between student and teacher and an awareness of the importance of play, experimentation, and fun.

The 1960s was an incredibly prolific period for Corita, and in many ways her works’ abiding concerns mirror the shifting moods of the decade, from the optimism and can-do spirit of the early 60s, to the insistent activism of mid-decade, to the frustration that accompanied the disillusion and violence at the period’s end. Still, Corita did not despair, and her work remained affirmative and ever-hopeful throughout her life.

-Erin Maynes, Hoehn Curatorial Fellow for Prints, 2014-17