Corita Kent and the Language of Pop
Corita Kent, “the juiciest tomato of all,” 1964. Screenprint. Collection of Jason Simon, New York, TL41302. © Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles.
American artist Corita Kent juxtaposed spiritual, pop cultural, literary, and political writings alongside symbols of consumer culture and modern life in order to create bold images and prints during the 1960s. Also known as Sister Mary Corita, Kent is often seen as a curiosity or an anomaly in the pop art movement. Corita Kent and the Language of Pop positions Kent and her work within the pop art idiom, showing how she is an innovative contemporary of Andy Warhol, Edward Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, and other pop art icons. The exhibition examines Kent’s screenprints as well as her 1971 bold “rainbow swash” design for the Boston Gas (now National Grid) tank located alongside I-93 south of downtown Boston, claiming it as the city’s own pop art monument. More than 60 of Kent’s prints appear alongside about the same number of works by her prominent contemporaries, along with a selection of films, books, and other works.
The exhibition also expands the current scholarship on Kent’s art, elevating the role of her artwork by identifying its place in the artistic and cultural movements of her time. In particular, the exhibition explores how Kent’s work both responded to and advanced the concerns of Vatican II, a movement to modernize the Catholic Church and make it more relevant to contemporary society. The church advocated, among other changes to traditional liturgy, conducting the Mass in English. Kent, like her pop art contemporaries, simultaneously turned to vernacular texts for inclusion in her prints, drawing from such colloquial sources as product slogans, street signs, and Beatles lyrics.
Kent (1918–1986) was a Roman Catholic nun, artist, and teacher. From 1936 to 1968 she lived, studied, and taught at the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, and she headed the art department at the college there from 1964 to 1968. In 1968, Kent left Immaculate Heart and relocated to Boston, where she lived until her death in 1986.
The exhibition catalogue, published by the Harvard Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press, offers nearly 90 illustrated entries and four essays by distinguished scholars and fills a gap in the scholarship about Kent’s work.
The exhibition travels to the San Antonio Museum of Art (February 13 through May 8, 2016) after its time in Cambridge.
Organized by the Harvard Art Museums and curated by Susan Dackerman, the former Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums (2005–2014) and current consultative curator of prints.
Corita Kent and the Language of Pop has been made possible by support from Barbara Ketcham Wheaton and the late Robert Bradford Wheaton, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, Jeanne and Geoff Champion, John Stuart Gordon, Marjorie B. and Martin Cohn, Ellen von Seggern and Jan Paul Richter, the Rosenblatt Fund for Post-War American Art, the Anthony and Celeste Meier Exhibitions Fund, and the Harvard Art Museums Mellon Publication Funds, including the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and major corporate support from National Grid.
Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.
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Exhibition-Related Programming
Information about events, including the opening celebration, lectures, gallery talks, a poetry walk, and workshops, can be found in our calendar.
Digital Tools
The museums’ self-guided Art + Science digital tool includes information about the Straus Center’s recent study of Kent’s works on Pellon, an acrylic nonwoven material developed by the garment industry. A video detailing the conservation treatment of her silkscreen, come off it (1966), is included.
The museums’ self-guided StoryCorps and Corita Kent digital tool collects five edited segments from recorded conversations about Kent and our exhibition Corita Kent and the Language of Pop. The project is a partnership between StoryCorps, the Harvard Art Museums, and National Grid.
Related
An exhibition exploring Kent’s teaching, artistic process, career, and activism, _Corita Kent: Footnotes and Headlines, is on display August 24 through December 4, 2015, at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Related Publications
Corita Kent and the Language of Pop
Known widely as a Catholic nun with an avant-garde flair, Corita Kent (1918–1986) has a personal legacy that has tended to overshadow her extensive career as an artist. This handsomely illustrated catalogue places Kent in her rightful position among the foremost figures of pop art, such as Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein. Although Kent has been largely excluded from the academic and critical discourses surrounding 1960s American art, this publication reevaluates her importance and highlights how her work questioned and expanded the boundaries of the pop art movement. Four essays and nearly 90 catalogue entries pull together a variety of topics—art history, religion, politics, linguistics, race, gender, mass media, and advertising—that influenced Kent’s life and work during the 1960s. A roster of eminent pop scholars delve into the relationship between her art and that of her contemporaries, and explore how her art both responded to and advanced the changes in modern-day Catholicism stemming from Vatican II. Over 200 vibrant images showcase Kent’s ingenious screenprints, which often combine handwritten text and commercial imagery. Offering an unparalleled, rigorous study of an artist who has been largely overlooked, this book is an important contribution to scholarship as well as a fascinating presentation of Kent and her work to a wider audience.
PurchaseRelated Articles 12
Poetry Pop Up
What is pop? What is poetry? What is today? These questions—along with Corita Kent’s art—inspired one-of-a-kind verses.
Thomas Crow Talks Pop Art
Before his 12/10 lecture, Crow spoke with us about New Zealand artist Colin McCahon, Corita Kent, and pop art. Article snippet: “Kent and McCahon count as about the only artists you can put forward as credibly addressing theological questions.”
Films That Go Pop
Lindsey Lodhie, who helped develop our latest film series, shares some thoughts about the films and their relation to Corita Kent’s art.
Listening In
Five StoryCorps interviews related to Corita Kent will soon be up on the website of WBUR, our media partner for the StoryCorps project.
An Insider’s Perspective
We gathered insights into Corita Kent’s life and work from a close friend and former student of the artist.
Complementary Collection
As the fall semester kicks off, two Harvard exhibitions about Corita Kent will be in conversation with each other.
Getting the Word Out
90.9 WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, will be the media partner for our Corita Kent–inspired oral history project.
Boston’s Pop Landmark
Corita Kent designed an enduring landmark for Boston, the culmination of her decade-long engagement with pop art.
Boston’s Pop Landmark
Corita Kent designed an enduring landmark for Boston, the culmination of her decade-long engagement with pop art.
Welcome, StoryCorps
National oral history project StoryCorps is coming to the Harvard Art Museums, in conjunction with our Corita Kent exhibition.
Learning from the Artist
An uncommon material and fluorescent inks kept conservators on their toes while treating works for our upcoming Corita Kent exhibition.
Corita Kent’s Time
The Harvard Art Museums’ upcoming special exhibition Corita Kent and the Language of Pop highlights the role of Corita Kent in the pop art movement of the 1960s. The exhibition, which opens September 3, will contain more than 60 of Kent’s screenprints, along with about the same number of works by he...
Related Tours
StoryCorps and Corita Kent
In September 2015, the national oral history project StoryCorps visited Harvard to record conversations about the artist Corita Kent and our exhibition “Corita Kent and the Language of Pop.” This project, a partnership between StoryCorps, the Harvard Art Museums, and National Grid, recorded more than 12 hours of stories over 3 days, including stories by 35 participants.
Presented here is a selection of stories from five edited segments. All of the recordings we gathered will be preserved by StoryCorps for future generations in The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.