Art & Context 101
This guide includes information about the fine art prints on the 9th floor of Wells Library at Indiana University Bloomington. Use the resources on each page to uncover how art reflects the society in which it was created.
Articles about the "Pop Art Nun"
- Corita Kent, the pop art nun; She shook up the church and the art world with her expressive, exuberant and boisterous workRead about how Corita Kent transformed her life -- from nun to artist -- after viewing an Andy Warhol soup can painting.
- Corita Kent: the nun graphic designer who created “radical” protest art"Kent was producing art at the same time as the likes of Warhol, yet her work has garnered nowhere near the same fame, praise or respect as her contemporary."
Question: What spurred this former nun to change careers and become an artist?
The materials from IU Libraries can help us answer questions like these. Use the links on this page to learn more about Corita Kent's professional life as an artist.
Books from the Catalog
Come Alive! by Call Number: NE2237.5.K4 A4 2006ISBN: 9780954502522Publication Date: 2007At 18, Corita Kent (1918-86) entered the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, where she taught art and eventually ran the art department. After more than 30 years, at the end of the 1960s, she left the order to devote herself to making her own work. Over a 35-year career she made watercolors, posters, books and banners--and most of all, serigraphs--in an accessible and dynamic style that appropriated techniques from advertising, consumerism and graffiti. The earliest, which she began showing in 1951, borrowed phrases and depicted images from the Bible; by the 1960s, she was using song lyrics and publicity slogans as raw material. Eschewing convention, she produced cheap, readily available multiples, including a postage stamp. Her work was popular but largely neglected by the art establishment--though it was always embraced by such design luminaries as Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass. More recently, she has been increasingly recognized as one of the most innovative and unusual Pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionizing graphic design and making some of the most striking--and joyful--American art of her era, all while living and practicing as a Catholic nun. This first study of her work, organized by Julie Ault on the 20th anniversary of Kent's death, with essays by Ault and Daniel Berrigan, is the first to examine this important American outsider artist's life and career, and contains more than 90 illustrations, many of which are reproduced for the first time, in vibrant, and occasionally Day-Glo, color.
Power Up: Female Pop Art by Call Number: N6494.P6 S75 2010Publication Date: 2011The ladies of Pop Art play with art in the Bad Girl manner between Pin-Up and consumerism. These unconventional and powerful works are determined by female sexuality and lust, the post-war economic miracle and politics. Pop characterizes the humour and lightness of their attitude towards life. This book presents extraordinary women Pop artists. While it was mainly their male colleagues who have been celebrated up to the present, Power Up – Female Pop Art now casts light for the first time on prominent women artists. In the tension field between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, figuration and abstraction, consumerism and capitalism criticism, the works by these artists certainly resemble those by their male colleagues in terms of material, subject matter and working method. But at the same time, a specific female methodology, approach or interest is established based on exemplary works. The artists document and subjectify the post-war boom years, reflect the superficiality of consumerism and meet mass taste as pioneering feminist positions in their pithiness, monumentality, the simple vocabulary of forms as well as the gaudy choice of colours, and nevertheless remain combative, critical and extraordinary. Artists include: Evelyne Axell, Christa Dichgans, Rosalyn Drexler, Jann Haworth, Dorothy Iannone, Sister Corita Kent, Kiki Kogelnik, Marisol, Niki de Saint Phalle Exhibition Power up – Women Pop Artists, Kunsthalle Wien, 5 November 2010 – 23 January 2011.
Corita Kent: Gentle Revolutionary of the Heart by Call Number: World Wide WebPublication Date: 2017Corita Kent, an American nun and pop artist, led a life of creativity and love that took her in unexpected directions. In this engaging portrait, Sr. Rose Pacatte, FSP, offers an in-depth look at Corita Kent, gentle revolutionary of the heart, letting the beauty and truth of her life and art speak for itself.
Frances Elizabeth Kent's rise to fame coincided with some of the most socially volatile years of the twentieth century. As Sr. Mary Corita of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters, she became a nationally-respected artist-though the Archbishop of her home city of Los Angeles regarded her work as blasphemous. Seeing no contradiction between the sacred and the secular, Corita designed the US Postal Service's iconic "Love" stamp and created the largest copyrighted work of art in the world, on a gas tank for the Boston Gas Company. These examples and more exemplify the theology and point of view of one of the twentieth century's most famous and fascinating artists.
Someday Is Now by Call Number: N6537.K435 A4 2013Publication Date: 2013This full-scale survey of Corita Kent's work includes prints and ephemera from all phases of her life, revealing her importance as an activist printmaker and a sylistic innovator in graphic design. Artist, activist, teacher, and devout Catholic Corita Kent (1918-1986) eloquently combined her passions for faith and politics during her rich and varied career. As a teacher at LA's Immaculate Heart College, she fostered a creative and collaborative arts community and developed an interest in printmaking. Her posters, murals, and signature serigraphs combined messages of love and faith with images from popular culture and inventive use of type and color. For Kent, printmaking was a populist medium to communicate with the world around her. This activist spirit came most alive in the 1960s, when her posters and murals addressed subjects like racism and poverty, U.S. military brutalities in Vietnam, and conflicts between radical and conservative positions in the Catholic Church. Even after the war, and after she had left the church, she continued to be active in Boston's urban issues, producing prints and commissioned works until her death in 1986. Full of the lively, colorful work that was so iconically hers, this volume presents four decades of a life dedicated to serving others through and with the language of art. This book accompanies a traveling exhibition: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio June 6 - August 31, 2014 Baker Museum at Artis-Naples, Naples, Florida September 27, 2014 - January 4, 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania January 31 - April 19, 2015 Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, California June 14 - November 1, 2015
Corita Kent and the Language of Pop by Call Number: NE2237.5.C67 A4 2015Publication Date: 2015Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, September 3, 2015-January 3, 2016, and at the San Antonio Museum of Art, February 13-May 8, 2016.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
