Welcome to our collection of quotes by Corita Kent. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Corita Kent
Corita Kent (November 20, 1918 – September 18, 1986), born Frances Elizabeth Kent and also known as Sister Mary Corita Kent, was an American artist, designer and educator, and former religious sister. Key themes in her work included Christianity, and social justice. She was also a teacher at the Immaculate Heart College.
Corita was born Frances Elizabeth Kent on November 20th in the year of 1918. At 18 years of age Kent entered the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, which were known to be very progressive and welcomed creativity. Frances joined a teaching order, taking the name Sister Mary Corita. Initially she taught young children on an Inuit Reservation in British Columbia until returning to Los Angeles to study for her bachelor's degree at Immaculate Heart College and her master's degree at University of Southern California. She was the head of the art department at Immaculate Heart College. where she also taught a wide variety of different painting styles. Her artwork contained her own spiritual expression and love for her God.
Kent's primary medium was silk screen, also known as Serigraphy. She became self-taught after she sent away for a DIY silk screening kit. Her innovative methods pushed back the limitations of two-dimensional media of the times. Kent's emphasis on printing was partially due to her wish for democratic outreach, as she wished for affordable art for the masses. Her artwork, with its messages of love and peace, was particularly popular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.
Due to opposition from Cardinal James McIntyre (who had a particular dislike for Kent), the sisters would eventually be forced out of their schools in Los Angeles—with the exception of the college—and most of the sisters left the order entirely, while keeping the larger school. Kent, however, would move to the East Coast and begin to work independently. She also left the Catholic Church entirely.
After a cancer diagnosis in the early 1970s, she entered an extremely prolific period in her career, including the Rainbow Swash design on the LNG storage tank in Boston, and the 1985 version of the United States Postal Service's special Love stamp.
In recent years, Corita has gained increased recognition for her role in the pop art movement. Critics and theorists previously failed to count her work as part of any mainstream "canon," but in the last few years there has been a resurgence of attention given to Kent. As both a nun and a woman making art in the twentieth century, she was in many ways cast to the margins of the different movements she was a part of.
Corita's art was her activism, and her spiritually-informed social commentary promoted love and tolerance.
Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating -- whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.
Regard everything as an experiment.
Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is 'to fit together' and we all do this every day.
To create is to relate. We trust in the artist in everybody to make his own connections, his own juxtapositions.
Maybe we are less than our dreams, but that less would make us more than some gods would dream of.
Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
Consider everything an experiment.
Life stands still when mankind is afraid to take a chance.
To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Earnestness and sincerity are synonymous.
To understand is to stand under which is to look up to which is a good way to understand.
A responsible person is one who responds.
When you get past making labels for things, it is possible to combine and transform elements into new things. Look at things until their import, identity, name, use, and description have dissolved.
One of the things Jesus did was to step aside from the organized religion of his time because it had become corrupt and bogged down with rules. Rules became more important than feeding the hungry.
Art does not come from thinking but from responding.
Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail. There's only make.
Don't belittle yourself. Be BIG yourself.
Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each is to succeed.
Someone remarked that the newspapers or the news magazines are the same as the psalms except that the names changed in the stories. Maybe you can't understand the psalms without understanding the newspaper and the other way around.
You can enjoy the quality of the ad and not let them pressure you to buy what you don't really need. I have had fun taking back superlatives and just ordinary good words and phrases from ads and trying to restore some of their life to them.
Groceries became a revelation: the people coming out with bundles of food. It's all like a great ceremony, and the whole drudgery of shopping has become my inspiration.
I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.
When art has changed, it's because the world was changing.
A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.
Take an exhibit, in the days when we saw the Pop art -- Andy Warhol and all that -- tomato soup cans, etc., and coming home, you saw everything like A. Warhol.
In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.
Life is a succession of moments, to live each one is to succeed.
Damn everything but the circus.
When someone drew a picture of Pope John wearing an Avis 'We try harder' button, those words no longer meant which car rental to patronize, and yet some of the overtones from its original meaning are there and make a contribution to the new situation.
Love the moment and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries.
Words have life and must be cared for. If they are stolen for ugly uses or careless slang or false promotion work, they need to be brought back to their original meaning -- back to their roots.
Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.
That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.
Flowers grow out of dark moments.