Corita Kent taught attention through demanding exercises and contagious curiosity. For one student, the lessons ran from freeway billboards to conversations that continued long after college.
By Margin Tone
Corita Kent, the nun and artist who taught at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, could make a trip past a billboard into an education. In the 1960s she was turning supermarket packaging, advertising slogans, poems and scripture into screenprints. For her students, learning to make art began with finding something worth looking at in places they might already have dismissed.
Mary Anne Karia, who studied with Corita and became her assistant, loved nature and disliked the advertisements along the freeway. Corita kept pointing them out. “Oh look at that one! Look at that one!” Karia recalled in a 2015 interview with the Harvard Art Museums. One billboard announced, “Wait till you see what’s coming.” Corita wanted a reason to drive that way again. Weeks later the suspense resolved itself into an advertisement for toilet paper. They laughed together. By then Karia had come to enjoy the billboards too.
A teacher can tell students to keep an open mind; Corita gave them things to do with their eyes and hands. A finder, sometimes just an empty slide mount, isolated a small part of the view. An assignment in Learning by Heart, the book she wrote with Jan Steward, sends the student to a market, theatre, park or another busy place for half an hour of looking through one. Afterwards, the student must find ten details on a nearby building and draw them there. Memory, the instructions warn, is unreliable about details.
Half an hour with a small opening leaves plenty of time to notice what a quick glance misses. Corita then asked her students to commit those details to paper.
In class, Karia remembered having to draw a single magazine image a hundred times with a stick and India ink. There wasn’t time to criticize every attempt. “You just kept going,” she said. In her account, some of the most exciting drawings arrived as the students worked past their restrictions. Corita’s exuberance came with a considerable workload. The encouragement was to continue long enough to discover something the first attempt hadn’t offered.
Teaching had helped determine her own medium. She joined the college’s art faculty in 1947 and began experimenting with screenprinting partly because it seemed useful to students preparing to become teachers. Ray Smith’s biography for the Hammer Museum also describes her wish to make affordable multiples that people could live with. The prints could be bought at the college, in church bookstores or by mail. Her attention to ordinary surroundings extended to where the finished work might go.
By 1962, advertising’s words and appearance were entering the prints. Across from the college stood a Market Basket supermarket. When Corita began directing the annual Mary’s Day religious celebration in 1964, she and her students brought their experiments with lettering, colour and signs into a pageant that also drew attention to hunger.
Her 1964 print mary does laugh makes that meeting explicit. The University of San Diego’s collection record describes the cropped Market Basket logo, “Mar Bas,” beside words by Marcia Petty: “Mary does laugh; and she sings and runs.” The familiar shop sign had become part of a picture about Mary.
In enriched bread, the package copy remains cheerfully recognizable: “Help build strong bodies 12 ways” and “no preservatives added.” Alongside those Wonder Bread promises, the Corita Art Center’s transcription records a passage by Albert Camus about hope nourished by ordinary individuals. The bread’s claims to nourishment now share the page with a more difficult kind of sustenance. Corita allowed the commercial language to remain itself while asking it to keep new company.
Those combinations required decisions after the gathering and looking were over. The Hammer Museum’s account of her preparatory layouts describes layers of images and text on paper and precise directions for the printer. A hundred drawings and a half-hour with a finder make sense beside that care: discovery needed to be followed through into a particular arrangement on a sheet.
For Karia, the education continued long after college. When she moved to New York and found the adjustment difficult, she spoke with Corita every few weeks. Her former teacher read constantly and recommended books. “After our conversations,” Karia remembered, “I would feel as if someone threw open the windows of my life.”
