Paying tribute to an artist inspired by Andy Warhol—and who happened to be a nun

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 4:12 pm by Deacon Greg Kandra

Paying tribute to an artist inspired by Andy Warhol—and who happened to be a nun 2015-03-13T16:12:53-04:00 Deacon Greg Kandra

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Image: from NPR, courtesy the Corita Art Center

And you’ve probably seen her work and not even realized it. Who knew?

From NPR:

Corita Kent’s silkscreens were once compared to Andy Warhol’s; her banners and posters were featured at civil rights and anti-war rallies in the 1960s and ’70s; she made the covers of Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post; and she even created a popular postage stamp. Yet today, Kent seems to have fallen through the cracks of art history.

n exhibition created by Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum, and which opens later this month at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, aims to change that. Ian Berry co-curated “Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent,” a retrospective of Kent’s 30-year career, and has a good idea of why her artistic reputation has taken a hit. He says, “An ‘artist’ was from New York. They were a man; they were an epic, abstract painter. And she wore a habit — she just didn’t look like what the, sort of, movie version of an artist looked like.”

Sister Corita Kent headed the art department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Graphic designer and art historian Lorraine Wild says Sister Corita, as she was known, had already been experimenting with the silkscreen printing process when she saw a now legendary 1962 exhibition of Warhol’s work.

“What she got from Warhol, clearly, was that there was this powerful imagery in pop culture that came out of advertising,” Wild says. “And that if you just looked at it from a slightly different angle, you could read all these other things into it, and it already had a kind of power because the audience was familiar with it.”

One slogan she appropriated was General Mills’ “The Big G stands for Goodness,” which referred to the capital G the company used for its logo. “And she turns that into ‘G,’ ‘God;’ ‘goodness,’ ‘spiritual goodness,'” Wild says.

Kent also freely juxtaposed advertising logos with Bible verses and quotes from Gertrude Stein and e.e. cummings. In her hands, images from a Wonder Bread wrapper turned into a meditation on poverty and hunger.

Check out the rest, along with samples of her work, at the link.

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