Sister Mary Corita Kent: The ‘Pop Art Nun’ who turned the 1960s psychedelic
The title of ‘Pop Art Nun’ may seem a contrasting one to bear, but it is one that Sister Mary Corita Kent was granted when her art emerged in the early 1960s. While devoted to her Immaculate Heart church and college, Kent also created silk screens that remain beacons of contemporary art, created in response to the social upheaval of the age.
Kent was born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1918, and while she was raised by parents who appreciated art and encouraged their daughter’s passion for it, her family was working-class, so she made do with limited options for tangibly creating art. She and her four older siblings attended the Blessed Sacrament School, which was staffed by Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who recognised Kent’s talents as an artist. When she graduated from the Los Angeles Catholic Girls’ High School in 1936, she followed in their footsteps and, at the age of 18, decided to enter the Immaculate Heart of Mary order.
Kent became Sister Mary Corita and, in turn, was surrounded by fellow nuns who shared a progressive world view championed by the community at Immaculate Heart, widely recognised for its liberal catholicism. Continuing with her creativity, she enrolled at Otis (now called Otis College of Art and Design) and Chouinard Art Institute, before earning her bachelor’s degree from Immaculate Heart College in 1941, while living and working in the Immaculate Heart community in Los Angeles.
She was asked to join Immaculate Heart’s faculty and, while obtaining her master’s degree, she elevated her art when deciding to teach herself how to use a silk screen kit, in short, learning how to make stencil-based prints through a mesh screen, also known as serigraphy. This medium became a defining one of Kent’s work in her early days as a fully-fledged artist in the 1950s. Her silk screens did, however, receive some negative retaliation from her church’s hierarchy.
“Her silk screens were much more like abstract expressionist paintings,” described Cynthia Burlingham, the deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California, “They were layered and multi-coloured.”
In response, by the early 1960s, Kent turned to what is now known as pop art, a movement rooted in the use of mass media, everything from advertisements to celebrities’ likenesses, to evoke a borderline kitschy perspective of culture. While it was preceded by the likes of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in wielding irony and criticism, the form was most widely popularised by Andy Warhol, beginning with his (in)famous depictions of Campbell’s soup cans.
It was these Campbell’s soup cans that Kent is believed to have seen at a gallery in Los Angeles, sparking her interest in the art movement. By then, she was known in America for her art, while Warhol’s name was just beginning to circulate; the two became fans of each other, recognising a kinship in art and faith alike.
In pop art’s freeform approach to modernity, Kent found the space to comment on the social issues that occupied her mind, for the time in which she was creating was ripe with upheaval and turmoil. Her position as both a nun and artist proved curious; she had the multiple perspectives of a devout Catholic, educator and creative to allow her to foster conversation in an intriguing way. Pop art afforded her the space to combine scripture with other forms of popular culture, such as rock and folk music, advertising slogans and images, and more found their way into her work. Her tangible creations of the serigraphs were both meticulous and free-flowing, wherein she worked with a vision, while allowing the opportunity for ideas to be born, in tandem.
“You can be led either by the end or the process,” Kent explained, while being filmed making a serigraph in 1967, “You have a kind of trust in the process that almost anything you do will have possibilities”.
By 1962, she became known as the ‘Pop Art Nun’, becoming so popular in her work that she was granted her own studio in Immaculate Heart’s art department, a space where she and her community of artists could work freely. Here, Kent encouraged an artistry that reflected the wider popular culture that surrounded them, and became immersed in the burgeoning pop art scene.
“Consumer culture was the language they could understand, so that’s what she used. She’s reappropriating symbols to make a spiritual message,” Ray Smith, the director of the Corita Art Centre, explained, “Airplanes became guardian angels. Wonder Bread stood in for the eucharist.” In the latter artwork depicting a loaf of Wonder Bread, Kent’s artwork reads, “helps build strong bodies 12 ways STANDARD LARGE LOAF”.
Kent’s approach was a fascinating one: certainly, she afforded her young students the freedom to utilise what consumed their minds most, and taught them how one form of media had the potential to reflect the other. Who hasn’t mistaken an aeroplane for a star, or a passing wish? Kent saw the potential in these fleeting images, often taken for granted, and wielded them for social commentary.
After the Second Vatican Council in 1963, Kent saw the results’ more secular perspective as an opportunity to mirror the same liberalism at Immaculate Heart. That year’s annual Mary’s Day celebration at the college saw a massive turnout, largely inspired by Kent’s work within the art department and her own ‘celebrity’, of sorts. Creatives of the day (and fans) came to visit, everyone from director Alfred Hitchcock to composer John Cage. Her work also became even more political, addressing subjects of anti-war, humanitarianism, racism and social justice.
Kent asked her students to compose ‘rules’ for what an artistic learning environment could be, eventually compiled into the ‘Ten Rules’ hosted by the Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules, which included, “Consider everything an experiment”, “Nothing is a mistake… There’s only make”, and “The only rule is work”. They close with, “There should be new rules next week”. The list was circulated among many art studios across the United States, as Kent became a public voice in her artistry.
However, this did not mean that she did not receive criticism, catching the attention of the conservative archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal James McIntyre, who vehemently disagreed with Kent’s fusion of art and scripture. He had once declared her work “blasphemous” and labelled Immaculate Heart “communist”, and later, he took particular issue with her 1964 work titled The Juiciest Tomato of Them All. In the print, large block letters spell “TOMATO”, with scrawled handwriting that begins, “If we are provided with a sign that declares, ‘Del Monte Tomatoes are juiciest [sic]’, it is not desecration to add: ‘Mary Mother is the juiciest [sic] tomato of them all’.”
Despite judgment from the church officials, Kent’s work only grew, becoming increasingly socially and politically conscious in response. As the 1960s progressed and became more tumultuous, Kent’s anti-war sentiments were frequent. A 1967 work, highly prized, depicts the title in a psychedelic magenta font plastered over a “Freeway Entrance” road sign, balanced with handwriting that quotes the American playwright Lorraine Hansbury, beginning with, “I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care”. Another 1967 work was blatantly titled, Stop the Bombing, in blue, with handwriting that asks, “I am in Vietnam—who will console me?”
That year, Kent appeared on the cover of Newsweek’s Christmas issue, her image and art shown with a headline that read, ‘The Nun: Going Modern’. The following year, 1968, Kent’s exhaustion reached its peak, and she decided to take a sabbatical, which turned into her seeking dispensation from her vows; that is, at 50 years old, she chose to leave her religious community and began transitioning into secular life as Corita Kent.
While this transition certainly was not an easy one, it did see her continue with her art and commentary across civil rights, women’s rights and anti-war sentiment. Kent would be diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1974, and became restricted to watercolour painting; her printmaking waned, and she only created them when she felt absolutely necessary. Still, she was widely commissioned for artwork across book covers, billboards, murals and later, a postage stamp that would become one of her best-known works, first debuted in 1985. She would pass away the following year, 1986, at the age of 67.
In a similar vision to the stamp, a 1978 work called promise shows colourful lines of the rainbow paired with handwriting that reads, “To believe in god is to know that all the rules will be fair and that there will be wonderful surprises”, and a wonderful surprise to the art world she was.
