LOS ANGELES — Radical “Pop-Art Nun” Corita Kent is moving downtown. This Saturday, March 8, the Corita Art Center (CAC) will open the doors of its new home in LA’s Arts District, providing a suitable space for the public to experience the artwork and legacy of this “joyous revolutionary” who fused elements of social justice, spirituality, and mass media in her vibrant serigraphs.
The new location will serve as a home for the artist’s foundation, an archive and gallery for her work, an educational space, and a meeting spot for community partnerships, continuing Kent’s extension of art into life. It will be open to the public on Saturdays and host school groups on Fridays for the time being. Admission is free, but reservations are required.
Born Frances Elizabeth Kent in 1918, Sister Mary Corita, as she would come to be known, joined the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an order of nuns in Hollywood, at the age of 18. She graduated from Immaculate Heart College in 1941 and began teaching art there in 1947. She soon began making screenprints, drawing imagery and text from consumer culture, magazines and newspapers, literature, religious sources, and contemporary music to create eye-catching and layered works.
“There was no hierarchy to where she was pulling language from,” CAC Executive Director Nellie Scott explained at a press preview for the new center on Wednesday, March 5.
Immaculate Heart was notably progressive for the time, with Scott likening it to a “West Coast Black Mountain College,” welcoming guests from Charles Eames and Buckminster Fuller to experimental composer John Cage. In 1964, the Art Department took over the college’s Mary’s Day procession, transforming it into “a prototype for California culture of the 1960s, with flowers in your hair and a focus on social justice,” Scott said. Kent’s progressive ideas regarding civil rights, anti-war efforts, and church reform began to take on more prominent roles in her own artwork as well.
As the 1960s progressed, friction between the conservative Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Kent and her fellow nuns grew, and in 1968, she sought dispensation from her vows and moved to Boston. The order turned into the Immaculate Heart Community, an ecumenical lay community that is still active.
That same year, she began working on her heroes and sheroes series (1968–69), 29 prints portraying prominent figures — including Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and the Berrigan brothers, priests who were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for burning draft cards and other anti-war activities — alongside historical and newspaper photos, religious imagery and verses, and evocative quotes from contemporary writers, musicians, and activists. Heroes and Sheroes is the title of the Center’s inaugural exhibition, which marks the first time the series has been shown in its entirety in the US.
Also included in the exhibition is “My People” (1965), a print that reproduces an LA Times front page on the Watts Uprising, accompanied by a quotation from Father Maurice F. Ouellet, who participated in the Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama. Scott referred to this as Kent’s first overtly political work, a turning point that set the stage for heroes and sheroes. The exhibition will be on view for a year and later travel on a tour of as yet unannounced university art galleries, accompanied by a curriculum that connects its themes of protest, collective action, and hope to current events, according to Scott.
When Kent died in 1986, her archives comprising 30,000 artworks and pieces of ephemera — as well as 18,000 35mm slides which the Center has recently digitized — went to the Immaculate Heart Community, which founded the CAC in 1997. Although the foundation was technically open to the public, it was located within Immaculate Heart High School, with a narrow hallway for an exhibition space, less than ideal in terms of access and visibility. Last fall, the CAC announced its transformation into an independent nonprofit and its relocation plans, made possible with a $5 million seed grant from the IHC.
Kent was well-known during her lifetime, “the poster child for the radical nun of the 60s,” as Scott notes, and appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1967. Her “Love” stamp, which she designed in 1985, sold 700 million copies, the best-selling stamp up to that point. Although she is still an influential figure, beloved by many in design, art, and activist communities, her status in the collective consciousness is not as prominent as it once was, even in LA.
“I’m often asked, ‘How did I not know about her? How is she not a household name?’” Scott said at this week’s preview. “That’s a big part of our mission. Our highest hope is that LA wraps its arms around her.”
