This was published 7 years ago
Sister Corita's Summer of Love review: 'Slow looking' at art a beautiful habit
By Penny Webb
CRAFT
SISTER CORITA'S SUMMER OF LOVE
Ian Potter Museum of Art, Parkville, until March 27
Frances Elizabeth Kent grew up in Los Angeles. In 1936, aged 18, she entered the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) taking her vows as Sister Mary Corita.
Detail of People like us yes, 1965 screenprint by Sister Corita Kent. Credit: Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles, CA
"Frannie" had always been artistic. As Sister Corita, her education (a BA from the IHM College, in 1941; an MA from the University of Southern California, in 1951) and concurrent teaching career had spectacular results.
Film footage in this touring show of silkscreen prints records her composure, sweet smile, energy and sense of purpose.
(Give the gang) the clue is in the signs, 1966 screenprint by Sister Corita Kent.Credit: Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles, CA
The IHM was progressive, but the urgency of Sister Corita's imagery reflects the zeitgeist. Under her leadership, from 1964-68, the college's staid Mary's Day celebrations became "happenings", with floral crowns and painted props.
With her knowledge of contemporary visual art (the Pop Art of Andy Warhol, but also Abstract Expressionism absorbed in annual trips to New York) and design (including the graphic art of Saul Bass), Sister Corita was in her element in the heightened atmosphere of the time and open to the stimulus of the street.
Her printing experiments with paper stencils and glue resist are technically audacious. But what characterised her images and determined her fame was a lifelong pleasure in letterforms – whether in manuscript, signwriting or packaging.
"I always think of letterforms as much objects as people or flowers or other subject matter," she told Bernard Galm in 1976 (see UCLA's Oral History Unit).
Life is a complicated business, 1967 screenprint by Sister Corita Kent. Credit: Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles, CA
By quotations in her prints, we know what Sister Corita was reading – from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Martin Luther King Jr; from Robert Frost to Robert F. Kennedy.
E. E. Cummings was a favourite and she would have been aware of his satirical use of advertising slogans in poems of the 1920s. Cummings' own typographic innovations for the page may have partly inspired her to photographically distort words, as in the 1967 print Things Go Better With.
Yes 3, 1979, by Sister Corita Kent, part of Sister Corita's Summer of Love at the Ian Potter Museum of Art.Credit: Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles, CA
But the writer whose outlook on life comes closest to Sister Corita's is Albert Camus. Enriched Bread (1965) and Gentle Stirring, (1968), the latter from the Circus Alphabet series, contain the same quote about human equality.
It reminds us that, through her familiarity with the extensive collection of folk art collected by her mentor Sister Magdalen Mary, Sister Corita had long questioned the distinction between high and low art, and between fine and commercial art.
Circus Alphabet - E eye love, a 1968 screenprint by Sister Corita Kent, contains a quote from Albert Camus, one of her biggest influences.Credit: Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles, CA
Crucially, she wanted her students (mostly trainee teachers) to develop what she called "slow looking". "Look at movies carefully, often," was a "helpful hint" that supplemented her rules for working in the college art department.
Relinquishing her vows, Corita Kent lived on the East Coast for a decade and a half until her death in 1986.
She had achieved single-name celebrity, appearing on the cover of Newsweek, in 1967; seen the completion of the largest mural in the world, her Rainbow Swash, for a Boston gas storage tank, in 1971; and the issue, in 1985, of a postage stamp with her design.
Her final, tentative observations of nature in watercolours reflected her changed circumstances, but, as she had told students: "The limitations of an assignment free you not to have to do everything. There is no art without obstacles."
Revisionist curators seek to position her as a Pop artist. We should resist that barren project. John Cage's playfully transcendent process of indeterminacy is more to the point. Let's not forget, those provocative (and changing) art department rules included, "Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail. There's only make."
For Sister Corita, aesthetic responses could help intensify other experiences: to feel, to respond, was everything. And love was her creed.