It was hard to miss the painting on the far wall, even from where I stood way across the room. Although smaller than most artwork on the wall, the deep red brushstrokes and bold black arrow made it stand out like a command.
I had browsed the auction house’s website but didn’t recall this painting as one that willed me to look closer. But when I got to the auction house for the preview, it was demanding.
“Prejudice is the child of ignorance. William Hazlitt” was written in thin white script against a wide band of black paint near the top.
I searched the bottom right for the artist’s name, but it was written so faintly that I could not decipher it. It looked to be Court, so I Googled but nothing came up. I tried a few other words, even describing the image, and finally came up with a name. One that surprised me.
Sister Mary Corita Kent. It had been done by a nun. I assumed it was a print because I found several copies of it on the web, along with an art center in her name at the Immaculate Heart Community in Los Angeles, which collects and preserves her works.
I bought the print because I liked it and its message, and was intrigued by its maker. After I got it home and took out my magnifying glass, I saw that she had signed it: “for Bob.” The print was made from a magazine ad in her Westinghouse series, one of 27 designs created from 1966 to 1980 for Westinghouse Broadcasting Co.
Corita Kent created serigraphs (800 of them) and watercolors, and painted on commission for both public and private entities (including a Rainbow Swash on a gas storage tank in Boston). She was fond of serigraphs, according to the website, because she wanted her art to be both affordable and accessible to everyone.
Through her art, Kent spoke out against racism, poverty, hunger and social injustices – and for love and peace – during the 1960s and beyond. Love, in fact, was a common theme, even in the U.S. postage stamp she designed in 1985.
“Art does not come from thinking, but from responding,” she once wrote.
It has taken years for her to be recognized among the notables in the male-dominated world of Pop Art. However, several exhibitions of her works and her importance have been and are still being held.
She was born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Iowa in 1918, and began showing an interest in art early – especially medieval art – which her father encouraged. She entered the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary after high school and later taught art at its Immaculate Heart College.
She won her first art prize in 1952 in a competition in Los Angeles with a religious piece titled “The Lord is With Thee.” In 1962, she went to an Andy Warhol exhibit and was struck by his use of soup cans. It changed her direction and her mind about what art could do.
“It shook me up,” she said later. “He’s telling us what life is like for him … Maybe we need (something) to shake us up a bit.”
She created the banner for the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. She organized a Christmas display at IBM the next year. A few years later, she was on the cover of Newsweek magazine. Kent was becoming a well-known artist and educator with her bold statements on paper, to the chagrin of the Los Angeles Archdiocese. Her 1964 serigraph “the juiciest tomato of them all,” referring in tiny script to the Virgin Mary, was considered especially blasphemous.
Kent took a sabbatical from the college in 1968, eventually settling in Boston and continuing to paint and create serigraphs. She left the college and the convent that year, but she did not leave the church.
Her works are full of meaningful quotes, Bible verses and sayings placed alongside advertising slogans, photos and magazine cover – ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to the Beatles. A protest artist, her works were used at civil rights and anti-war rallies.
Her serigraph “E eye love” with a quote from Albert Camus – written in a letter to a German friend who had become a Nazi – is just as timely today: “I should be able to love my country and still love justice.”
“I couldn’t march and be in the public that way. I had to bring into the work…,” she said in an oral history interview in 1976. “The idea that using words with visual forms and using just short passages is often a way to help awaken people to something they may not be aware of, rather than enclosing it in a book or making a speech.”
Kent died of cancer in 1985.
