How a Radical Nun Became Best Friends with Charles Eames

"What we, who love Immaculate Heart, want for the college is easier to taste then it is to say—" began Charles Eames's plea to the Los Angeles Times imploring the community to save the imperiled institution. The year was 1967 and Los Angeles's most avant-garde art institution was a seminary helmed by the fierce Sister Corita Kent, America's highly unlikely champion of the Pop Art phenomena. The plea continues, "We want these buildings to demand something of those who enter them and to enrich and shelter those who remain within."
Born Frances Elizabeth Kent from Dodge, Iowa, in 1918, Corita Kent, alongside her blood sister, joined Immaculate Heart at the tender age of 18. There, armed with scant resources and little guidance, she took it upon herself to learn serigraphy, or silk-screening—which still had the unseemly connotations of plebeian frugality. This June, roughly 250 of Corita's printswill decamp to the Pasadena Museum of California Art for the largest full-scale retrospective of her work. The exhibition, Someday Is Now, runs until November 1st and will examine the breadth of her work—everything from Brillo pads to the Civil Rights Movement is memorialized—which relied upon a playful juxtaposition of high and low culture.
Often described as a joyful harbinger of Andy Warhol, Sister Corita's vivid work gleefully mixes scripture and lyric, advertorial and religious iconography, and, of course, the looming idea of what's right and wrong. Sister Corita rejected the staunch amorality of post-war art and instead, like Charles and Ray Eames, was consumed by a desire to do the right thing. Often described as her mentor, it was after she met Charles Eames in 1955 that she began to introduce words into her work. Later, she would do small projects for him here and there—a screen-print of a wire chair, the calligraphy on a poster, a studio visit with her students.

Photo of Eames' wire chairs in PMCA's exhibition via Esoteric Survey

Photo via Residence Magazine

Although the exact details of how Sister Corita Kent befriended Charles and Ray Eames, the madcap postwar design couple, are, by now, quite blurry, it's very likely that she was bold and forthright about it: Under the guise of her cheekily titled Great Men Lecture Series, Sister Corita wrote to a cadre of complete strangers— Alfred Hitchcock, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller—and, very simply, asked them to come and help her teach. And, most of them did.
Under Sister Corita's watchful eye, Immaculate Heart became a veritable factory of experimental printmakers, activists, and, as dubbed by Newsweek, "The Modern Nun." In fact, George Nelson reportedly once complained thatthe only thing wrong with Immaculate Heart College was that he couldn't send his son to it.

Photo of Sister Magdalen Mary and Sister Corita Kent via Flickr user Patricksmercy

The Archbishop James McIntyre was not a fan. A precursor to the radical right of the '70s, he often described Corita's work as "weird and sinister." However, it wasn't until 1968 that the Catholic Church gave the seminary an ultimatum—they could rein in artmaking and political demonstration, or dispense of their vows completely. However, by the time the nuns chose to leave and form their own private organization, Sister Corita was long gone. She died in 1986.

by Katherine Wisniewski

Via curbed.com
see: http://curbed.com/archives/2015/06/25/sister-corita-kent-charles-ray-eames-exhibition.php

Corita Kent biblical print has Eames chairs

Bold graphics in shades of pink and lemon yellow. Poetic phrases, borrowed from e.e. cummings and Gertrude Stein. Bits of typography that torque and bend. The survey devoted to the art of Corita Kent at the Pasadena Museum of California Art gathers a lifetime of masterful printmaking by one of the more compelling figures in 20th century art.
Kent was an activist, artist and Catholic nun who shaped a generation of young artists as a professor at the now-closed Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. She also palled around with the likes of composer John Cage and Charles and Ray Eames in the 1960s, appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1967 and went on to inspire art world figures such as Mike Kelley with her wild graphics.
The Pasadena show is especially worthwhile for including some of the earliest works of Kent, who died in 1986. These include colorful religious scenes that the artist made in the early 1950s, when she was fresh out of graduate school.
"This was when she was just getting out of USC," says Michael Duncan, one of exhibition's co-curators. "She was eager to experiment and rattle the cage of traditional religious art. She wanted to do something different than the pretty, pretty pictures that were in Sunday school texts. As she said, she wanted to get away from the 'shampoo-ad Jesus.' "
[Corita Kent] wasn't afraid of mess, ever. This was something she had tried to instill in her students: don't be afraid -- fear shouldn't be part of art-making.- Michael Duncan
During this time, she produced deeply layered prints of traditional religious iconography — Virgin and child, Crucifixion — featuring an array of colors, some embedded with words and letters, all inspired by a range of influences, from Byzantine art to the work of the early 20th century political printmaker Ben Shahn.
One of these pieces is a print she made in 1952 titled "At Cana of Galilee." It depicts the miracle in which Christ turned water into wine. Certainly, it's an abstracted view of the proceedings. The print features layers of orange, pink and purple showing the wedding couple (likely the pair at the bottom) along with silhouettes of revelers, images of chalices and — quite curiously — a repeating image of an Eames chair.
"There's this impulse to speak to a contemporary audience, but she's still holding on to religious graphics," Duncan says. "It shows incredible ambition and excitement in making these things. 'Cana' could have done with a few less screens. It's pretty messy-looking. But it's also intriguing for that reason. ... She wasn't afraid of mess, ever. This was something she had tried to instill in her students: Don't be afraid — fear shouldn't be part of art-making."
Duncan, who has been studying Kent's work since the 1990s and previously curated important traveling shows of her work, says in this untidy, early work that it is possible to see the roots of what she would become known for in the 1960s.
"She becomes a master of color," he explains. "She learns how color works and how it can snap you to attention. Clearly, she's experimenting with that here, with these bright purples and oranges. It's interesting to compare it with the abstract art of the time."
The piece also tells an interesting story of transformation.
"In the story of Cana, Christ turns wine into water," Duncan explains. "It's part a transformation that is so much a part of Christianity and religion in general. Corita was transforming this by putting an Eames chair in there. She's making it modern. Later, she would transform advertising — by taking this cynical mode of communication and turning into something that bore much more profound content.

"It shows her ambition," he says, "a real desire to make something you can immerse yourself in."

By Carolina A. Miranda

Via Los Angeles Times

See: www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-object-lesson-corita-kent-at-cana-of-galilee-eames-chairs-20150623-column.html