A Political, Yet Spiritual, Reawakening

Sister Corita is a name associated with messages of hope and change. The activist nun and artist, Corita Kent, was a teacher in the art department of L.A.’s Immaculate Heart College during the ‘60s when the times, they were a changin’. Her bold, bright prints incorporating poetry, philosophy and song lyrics fused the graphic impact of Pop art with uplifting messages of spiritual endeavor.

Corita, who later dispensed with her last name, is possibly best known for creating the rainbow-hued mural of the Beatitudes for the Vatican Pavilion at the 1965 World’s Fair and, 20 years later, for designing the 22-cent “Love” stamp.

Although Corita’s work continues to hold a place in the hearts of many--and is included in dozens of museum collections--since her death of cancer in 1986, it has faded from art history.

To draw attention to her contribution to the art of the ‘60s and her continuing influence, two independent curators have organized separate exhibitions of her work here.

“The Big G Stands for Goodness: Corita Kent’s 1960s Pop” is on view at the Harriet and Charles Luckman Fine Arts Gallery at Cal State L.A. through Feb. 26. Organized by independent curator and art critic Michael Duncan, the survey of 50 prints is juxtaposed with works by 17 contemporary L.A. artists, much of whose work is indebted to the Pop art idiom.

“Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking” opens next Sunday at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum and runs through April 2. Artist Julie Ault presents 60 of Corita’s socially conscious serigraphs with 27 politically charged graphics of contemporary artist Moffett to demonstrate a relationship between the two.

In a way, the two curators were drawn to different but complementary aspects of Corita’s art. Duncan emphasizes Corita’s artistic originality, while Ault underscores her political message.

Interest in Corita’s work has been expanding over the past few years largely due to word of mouth among artists and collectors.

On the surface, though, Corita hardly seems the choice for a Pop art icon.

Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, she was raised in Los Angeles. In 1936, at age 18, she entered the sisterhood of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. She graduated from Immaculate Heart College in 1946, where she taught art until 1968. In the meantime, she received a master’s degree in art history from USC in 1950 and made her first serigraph two years later.

Although her work from the ‘50s is indebted to the earnest efforts of artists like Ben Shahn, the liberating effect that the 1960s had on Pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol led Sister Corita to start using language from advertisements. She took her students to supermarkets to seek out particularly seductive product packaging with double meanings, such as Sunkist oranges, Lark cigarettes and Wonder bread. Separating the words from their products and introducing her own handwritten commentary or the others’ poetry imbued these works with additional significance.

This period of creative revolution was occurring at the same time Pope Paul VI was calling for reform in the Catholic Church after Vatican Council II. Corita’s Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary provided an outline for change, such as continuing the education of nuns who were teachers and allowing nuns to wear dresses instead of habits. The Immaculate Heart nuns, along with their sisters across the country, suggested a shift in church priorities to the “social, economic, intellectual and spiritual needs of man.”

As a result, Sister Corita was featured on the cover of Newsweek on Christmas Day 1967, accompanying a story about “The Modern Nun.”

Jesuit poet Daniel Berrigan saw trouble ahead for the petite, blue-eyed nun. “She introduces the intuitive, the unpredictable into religion, and thereby threatens the essentially masculine, terribly efficient, chancery-ridden, law-abiding, file-cabinet church,” he said at the time.

In L.A, the church was scandalized by the radical suggestions of the Immaculate Heart nuns, especially the conservative archbishop, James Francis Cardinal McIntyre. He was so resistant to suggestions for reform that 90% of the nuns left the order, starting the ecumenical Immaculate Heart Community that now oversees the high school. The rest remained with the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Silver Lake and other convents around the Southwest.

Sister Corita, who once wrote, “We have been forced to notice newly the uniqueness of people and things as they squirm out of categories and definitions,” squirmed out herself, abandoning the life she had known for 32 years. At 50, she changed her name simply to Corita, left the order and in 1970 moved to Boston, where she went on to a successful career as a commercial artist and graphic designer.

The following year, she embraced her life outside the church, producing a print with a different sort of message: “Damn Everything but the Circus.”

In Los Angeles, Corita had both direct and indirect influence. Her ’60 prints, usually produced in a two-week frenzy, range from editions of 50 to 200 and still can be purchased from Immaculate Heart’s Corita Art Center, which owns some 600 of her 800 prints. She also left a set of prints to the Grunwald Center at UCLA.

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Of late, influential contemporary artists and collectors in L.A. have been quietly acquiring Corita prints, for between $200 and $1,000, from the Corita Art Center, on the top floor of the Immaculate Heart High School administration building. Corita’s work is always on view, though gallery director Peggy Kayser has installed “Life That Takes Place All Around Us,” a small show of prints and watercolors to provide a view of the artist’s work before and after the ‘60s.

Duncan believes Corita’s inventive method of juxtaposing graphic styles and borrowing from commercial slogans puts her in line with her peers Ed Ruscha, Allen Ruppersberg, Alexis Smith and Karen Carson, as well as the younger Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Larry Johnson and Lari Pittman, all of whom are in the show. “I wanted to show that there is a place for her in Southern California art history,” says Duncan, a frequent contributor to the journal Art in America.

“What’s remarkable about Corita,” he adds, “is that she took the signage of everyday life and used it to express her own form of liberal spirituality.” He notes the General Mills advertising slogan “The Big G Stands for Goodness” “is enlarged by Corita to express spiritual grace.”

At least one artist claims Sister Corita’s art as a direct influence. In 1967, Roy Dowell bought Corita’s serigraph incorporating Rilke’s poetry, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . . .” Dowell, whose own collages are in the Luckman show, recalls, “Here was a case where I could see the political, social, formal and popular coming together in a way that was very appealing to a young, idealistic teenager. Without being conscious of it, her work gave me permission to continue that kind of thing in my own work many years later.”

Ault, a founding member of the New York art collective Group Material, active between 1979 and 1996, organizes exhibitions as part of her art practice. Like Duncan, she was impressed after a friend introduced her to Corita’s work in the mid-’90s.

After researching Corita at the public library, she found her 1962 image of “Enriched Wonder Bread,” decorated with bright blue and red polka dots. “It astonished me, this beautiful piece of art that I had never seen before in accounts of Pop art,” Ault recalls. “I was fascinated by a nun quoting popular culture, recasting ‘Wonder bread’ to spiritualize this term.”

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A visit to the Immaculate Heart Community in L.A. prompted Ault to organize the shows juxtaposing the work of Corita with that of Moffett, an artist, graphic designer and AIDS activist who was a member of the art collective Gran Fury from 1987 and 1993. Founding partner of the design firm Bureau, Moffett explained that his art doesn’t connect visually with Corita’s art. “But content-wise, through the idea of social relevance in graphic art, there is a real relationship,” the New York artist said.

During that time, Moffett contributed montages of photographs and text, such as a picture of a sheep labeled “wolf,” to the Village Voice’s “Age of AIDS” column, which chronicled the perceived slow response from government and health organizations to the AIDS crisis. Ault wanted to preserve Moffett’s original, essentially ephemeral artwork by transferring it to the archivally sound, computer-generated Iris prints that are in the show.

The show also includes light-boxes of white roses superimposed with the word “Mercy.” Moffett’s more recent work can be seen in a separate installation of painted rug fragments and a long swatch of cream, charcoal and pale green striped carpet as a commentary on the Ten Commandments at Marc Foxx Gallery.

Ault, who originally presented the show in 1997 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., expanded it for this venue and emphasized the architectural aspects of the installation.

“I looked at Moffett’s work and Corita’s work in terms of their phraseology and graphic power,” Ault says. “They both bring the vernacular culture into the art context. Both had an investment in social change. Yet it was also a perverse pairing--a Catholic nun and a gay man. I brought their works into dialogue to see what happens. Their voices are so different. Moffett’s voice is sharp, confrontational. Corita’s is more joyful, playful. My role is in designing a forum in which a visual dialogue could take place.”

One can only wonder what Corita would think of all this attention nearly three decades after she left the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart. After surviving two cancer operations in the ‘70s, she was content to experience a quieter time in her life, driving around the countryside to paint watercolors of the New England landscape. Although she retained a strong connection to her spiritual roots, she grew less certain about some aspects of theology.

Two years before her death, she told a Newsweek reporter, “My feeling about God is that God is a total mystery.”

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* “The Big G Stands for Goodness: Corita Kent’s 1960s Pop,” through Feb. 26, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, 5151 State University Drive. Hours: Monday-Thursday and Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Admission, free. (323) 343-6608.

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* “Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking,” next Sunday through April 2, UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Admission: $4.50, adults; $3, seniors and non-UCLA students; $1, for UCLA students; free for members and children. (310) 443-7000.

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* “Life That Takes Place All Around Us,” through May 31, Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, 5515 Franklyn Ave., Monday- Friday. Call for appointment, (323) 466-2157.

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* “The Ten Commandments,” Donald Moffett, through Feb. 8, at Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Tuesday-Friday. (323) 857-5571.