Corita Kent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corita_Kent

Corita Kent (November 20, 1918 – September 18, 1986), aka Sister Mary Corita Kent, was born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Kent was an American Catholic nun, an artist, and an educator who worked in Los Angeles and Boston.

She worked almost exclusively with silkscreen, or serigraphy, helping to establish it as a fine art medium. Her artwork, with its messages of love and peace, was particularly popular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Kent designed the 1985 United States Postal Service's annual "love" stamp.

Biography

Upon entering the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles in 1936, Kent took the name Sister Mary Corita. She took classes at Otis (now Otis College of Art and Design) and Chouinard Art Institute and earned her BA from Immaculate Heart College in 1941. She earned her MA at the University of Southern California in Art History in 1951. Between 1938 and 1968 Kent lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart Community. She taught in the Immaculate Heart College and was the chair of its art department. She left the order in 1968 and moved to Boston, where she devoted herself to making art. She died of cancer in 1986.

Kent credited Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller, and art historian Alois Schardt for their important roles in her intellectual and artistic growth.

Kent created several hundred serigraph designs, for posters, book covers, and murals. Her work includes the 1985 Love Stamp and Rainbow Swash (1971), the 150-foot (46 m)-high natural gas tank in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.

Some of Corita Kent's most recent solo exhibitions include; Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, There Will Be New Rules Next Week at Dundee Contemporary Arts, and R(ad)ical Love: Sister Mary Corita at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Corita Kent's estate is represented by the Zach Feuer Gallery.

Artistic style

Corita Kent began using popular culture as raw material for her work in 1962. Her screen prints often incorporated the archetypical product of brands of American consumerism alongside spiritual texts. Her design process involved appropriating an original advertising graphic to suit her idea; for example, she would tear, rip, or crumble the image, then re-photograph it. She often used grocery store signage, texts from scripture, newspaper clippings, song lyrics, and writings from literary greats such as Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Albert Camus as the textual focal point of her work.

Collections

Corita Kent's work is held by several art museums and private collectors including The Whitney, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Partial list of publications

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corita_Kent#Partial_list_of_publications

Exhibitions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corita_Kent#Exhibitions