Corita Kent

"I'm not good at marching and speaking politically. But I want to do what I can to put myself to the greatest use in supporting that which I believe. So naturally, with me, it would have to be through my art."

–– Corita Kent, 1971

Corita Kent was an artist, teacher, and nun whose boldly colored prints often highlight the wonder of the everyday as they engage with progressive religious, social, and political themes.

Raised in a Catholic family, Kent joined the Roman Catholic order of nuns of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) in Hollywood in 1936 and remained a member until 1968. In 1941, she completed her BA at Immaculate Heart College (IHC), studying art history. Following a primary school teaching assignment from 1944 to 1947, Kent returned to IHC as faculty in the Art Department. In 1951, she earned an MA in art history from the University of Southern California, where she also studied printmaking. Around this time, she began creating screenprints in the collaborative context of IHC. In her words, Kent was drawn to the medium as "a very democratic form" that "enables me to produce a quantity of original art for those who cannot afford to purchase high quality art."

During the 1950s, Kent made gestural prints featuring biblical themes. Around mid-decade, she first introduced text to her images and soon routinely organized compositions around words. In 1962, she began borrowing the language and look of phrases from advertising and commercial packaging, aware of similar moves by artists associated with pop art, such as Andy Warhol. These prints also aligned with the deliberations of Vatican II––a religious council convened in 1962 with the aim of rendering Catholicism more accessible––by departing from more traditional doctrinal imagery to deliver spiritual content in the vernacular of mass media. Kent remarked, "It dawned on me that any subject matter was religious."

Nationally recognized for her prints by the mid-1960s, Kent was commissioned to create a banner for the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair and for IBM's 1965 Christmas display, both in New York City. She also first coordinated the annual Mary's Day celebration for IHC in 1964, helping transform the procession from a relatively staid affair to a performance art–like event.

By the mid-1960s, Kent's linguistic screenprints became more complex, featuring reversals, layerings, and distortions. She continued borrowing slogans from advertising to express spiritual ideas, as in a man you can lean on (1966, ​S​AAM). Kent also confronted national social and political unrest in her prints, juxtaposing larger lettering with smaller-scaled excerpts of poetry and theology to address racial injustices, as in new hope (1966, SAAM), and antiwar politics, like in stop the bombing (1967, SAAM).

Kent left the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1968, exhausted by her demanding schedule and by ongoing conflict with conservative forces within the Church, especially the archbishop of Los Angeles who sought to limit her artistic activities. Settling in Boston, she began work with a professional printer and used mass media photographic imagery, in addition to language, to directly address poverty, civil rights, and the antiwar movement. During the 1970s, Kent's prints featured looser, gestural forms, often drawn from her watercolors, alongside contemplative texts. She also continued receiving public commissions, creating a rainbow-like design for a highly visible gas tank in Boston in 1971 and a U.S. postage stamp in 1985.

Across her career, both within and outside the church, Kent's work manifested her belief that the artist's role is to take the "everyday world and [try] to make something of it."

Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women's History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024