Corita Kent Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life
Frances Elizabeth Kent, later known as Corita Kent, was born on November 20, 1918, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and raised in a Catholic family that relocated to Los Angeles during her childhood. In Southern California she developed an early love of drawing, lettering, and reading, practices that would later become central to her art. The cultural mix of Los Angeles, its signage, storefronts, and mass media imagery, offered the visual vocabulary she would mine for decades. Her faith tradition and the cadence of liturgical language also formed a foundation for her lifelong interest in blending text, image, and social conscience.

Religious Vocation and Education
In 1936 she entered the religious community of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and took the name Sister Mary Corita. She studied at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, earning a BA in 1941, and later completed an MA at the University of Southern California in 1951. While grounded in art history and design, she increasingly gravitated toward serigraphy (screenprinting), a medium that matched her fascination with bold color, layered text, and the look of everyday commercial graphics. The discipline of religious life and the rigor of academic study together shaped her belief that creativity could be taught, practiced, and shared in community.

Immaculate Heart College: Teaching and Artistic Breakthrough
Kent joined the faculty of Immaculate Heart College in the late 1940s and taught there until 1968, becoming chair of the art department in 1964. She helped build a nationally noted program by encouraging experimentation, critical looking, and collaboration. She and her colleagues welcomed innovative figures to campus; among the most influential were designers Charles and Ray Eames and the inventor-thinker Buckminster Fuller, whose visits expanded the horizons of students and faculty alike. Kent fostered a studio culture where students learned by doing, kept visual journals, and treated the city itself as a classroom. One of her students, Jan Steward, would later become a close collaborator and coauthor.

During the 1950s, Kent's prints often drew from sacred themes, combining rough-edged imagery with hand-lettered passages of scripture. In the 1960s her work took on a vivid Pop inflection. She appropriated typography and color schemes from packaging and advertising and fused them with quotations from the Bible, poets like e. e. cummings, and contemporary voices calling for justice. Prints such as enriched bread and the juiciest tomato of all exemplified her method of reframing consumer language to speak about spiritual nourishment and human dignity.

Art, Conscience, and the 1960s
As the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War reshaped American life, Kent's art became more explicitly engaged with social issues. She used the immediacy of screenprinting to respond quickly to current events, incorporating headlines, protest phrases, and appeals for peace. She quoted leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jesuit poet-activist Daniel Berrigan, weaving their words into images that urged viewers to act with courage and compassion. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and writer, corresponded with Kent and encouraged her artistic and spiritual explorations; his contemplative ethics echoed in her insistence that attention, joy, and justice were intertwined.

Conflict with Church Authority and Leaving Religious Life
The post-Vatican II period brought efforts at renewal within many religious communities, including the Immaculate Heart sisters. Their reforms in education and religious practice, and Kent's increasingly outspoken art, drew scrutiny from Los Angeles church officials. Tensions with Archbishop James Francis McIntyre intensified in the mid-1960s, as the sisters pressed for autonomy in their educational mission. Kent's prominence made her a lightning rod for criticism even as she attracted a wide public. In 1968 she left religious life and resumed her family name, continuing to work as Corita Kent. Many of her former sisters went on to establish the independent Immaculate Heart Community, committed to education and social justice.

Boston Years and Public Commissions
After leaving the convent, Kent moved to Boston and devoted herself to a full-time studio practice, lectures, and workshops. She continued to create series that addressed war, poverty, and hope. In the aftermath of the 1968 assassinations, she produced her Heroes and Sheroes prints, memorializing courage and loss while calling for renewal. In 1971 she created Rainbow Swash, a monumental painted design for a Boston Gas storage tank visible from the expressway. Its towering bands of color became a city landmark and also generated debate when some viewers perceived a profile embedded in the design; the image's prominence ensured that the conversation about public art, patriotism, and protest remained active.

Kent also brought her sensibility to national projects. In 1985 the United States Postal Service issued her Love stamp, a compact distillation of her message that everyday media could carry tenderness and goodwill. She worked across scales with the same intention: to place bright, legible, uplifting art into daily life.

Teaching Philosophy and Writings
Though no longer a nun or a college chair, Kent remained an educator to the end. Her exercises in seeing and making urged students to slow down, observe the ordinary, and discover possibility in constraints. She believed art could be a form of prayer and public witness, and that collaboration was a practical ethic. With Jan Steward she codified many of these ideas in Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit, a book completed before her death and published posthumously. Its short assignments, aphorisms, and classroom anecdotes distilled methods she refined at Immaculate Heart College and in workshops around the country.

Style and Methods
Kent's screenprints are notable for saturated color, stacked or overprinted text, and the interplay between commercial slogans and sacred or poetic language. She reclaimed the graphic force of supermarket labels and billboards to speak about love, peace, and the common good. The technique allowed her to work quickly and in editions, aligning process with her democratic aims: prints could circulate widely and affordably. While her art is often grouped with Pop, it retains a distinctive warmth grounded in community-making and a faith that language can heal when it is reframed with care.

Final Years and Death
Kent faced periods of ill health in her later years yet continued to produce commissions and prints, teach, and advise younger artists. She remained anchored in Boston while keeping ties to Los Angeles and to friends and collaborators from her teaching years. She died of cancer on September 18, 1986, in Boston.

Legacy
Corita Kent's legacy spans art, design, education, and social practice. She demonstrated that spiritual inquiry and visual innovation could coexist with public engagement, and that the tools of mass culture could be turned toward solidarity and joy. Her works reside in major collections, her Rainbow Swash remains a familiar Boston landmark, and her Love stamp endures as an emblem of accessible grace. The Corita Art Center in Los Angeles preserves her archive and educational vision, sustaining the network of students, colleagues, and admirers she inspired. The artists, designers, and educators who knew her or absorbed her example carry forward a model of creativity inseparable from attentiveness to the world and commitment to justice.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Corita, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Live in the Moment - Art - Equality - Resilience.