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COURTESY ARTHUR EVANS/THE TANG MUSEUM AT SKIDMORE COLLEGE
At All Scales
In the 1960s and 1970s, Sister Mary Corita Kent juxtaposed advertising and biblical messages in screen-printed artworks such as this one from 1967. Her work is the focus of an ongoing exhibition, Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent (p. 32).
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EXHIBITION Civil Rights Apostle Often compared to the work of Andy Warhol, Sister Mary Corita Kent’s silkscreens are bright, bold, and, most of all, uplifting. Her message reverberated throughout the civil rights protests and antiwar rallies of the 1960s and 1970s, when she made the cover of Newsweek and the Saturday Evening Post. Her name isn’t as well remembered as Warhol’s, but a traveling exhibition, Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, is changing that. After stops at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in Ohio, the 32
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Baker Museum at Artis-Naples in Florida, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, this full-scale survey of the artist’s work makes its final run at the Pasadena Museum of California Art through October 11, exhibiting pieces from Kent’s career of more than 30 years. “She saw [art] from a nun’s perspective,” says independent curator Michael Duncan, who co-curated the exhibition along with Ian Berry, director of the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, in collaboration with Corita Art Center in Los Angeles. “She took a very
humanist approach to advertising and discovered her own spiritual messages in the slogans and logos that Madison Avenue had come up with.” More than 200 prints are on view, including one of her best-known: the large cursive G of General Mills that Kent set against a curvy, red-striped background, with the words “The Big G Stands for Goodness.” “The G is not referring to what’s in the cereal bowl but to actual goodness or even God,” Duncan says. Kent juxtaposed advertising logos in this way, with Bible verses, and
quotes from Albert Camus or even the Beatles. After decades with only a cult following among contemporary artists like Mike Kelley, Pae White, and Jim Hodges, Kent’s work is reemerging because of a renewed interest in political, communitybased art-making, and social practice. “People are wanting things that are more direct, that have more to do with their lives rather than just price tags associated with Jasper Johns or Jeff Koons,” Duncan says. “Kent’s work feeds into that perfectly.”—Carren Jao JUL/AUG 2015
LEFT TO RIGHT: COURTESY ARTHUR EVANS/THE TANG MUSEUM AT SKIDMORE COLLEGE; COURTESY THE CORITA ART CENTER, LOS ANGELES
Above: wet and wild, a 1967 silkscreen print on paper by Sister Mary Corita Kent (pictured right, with her other works, in 1964). The print is in the collection of the Corita Art Center at the Immaculate Heart High School, Los Angeles.