PASADENA, CA.- The Pasadena Museum of California of California Art presents Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, the first full-scale survey of the America artist and activist Corita Kent’s rich and varied career. Covering a more than thirty-year oeuvre, the exhibition touches on her work as a designer, teacher, feminist, and civil-rights and anti-war activist. Her thousands of posters, murals, and signature serigraphs reflect a combined passion for faith and politics. Kent became one of the most popular graphic artists of the 1960s and 1970s, and her images remain iconic symbols that address the larger questions and concerns of that turbulent time.
“Few artists have explored the ramifications of the written word with the visual sophistication of Corita. Acclaimed for decades by cognoscenti as a unique contributor to Pop Art and the generator of an effective style of socially engaged art making, she is being rediscovered by a new generation bred on Photoshop, grassroots activism, font-tweaking, and DIY publishing,” says Michael Duncan, exhibition co-curator. “After a triumphal cross-country tour of four museums, the appearance of this exhibition in Southern California—where Corita grew up and taught—brings her fantastic project back home.”
Corita Kent was a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and taught in the art department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles from 1946 through 1968. There, she fostered a creative and collaborative arts community and developed a life-long interest in printmaking. At IHC, she developed her characteristic mixture of bold, bright imagery and provocative texts that she extracted from a range of cultural sources, including advertising slogans, grocery store signage, poetry, scripture, newspapers, magazines, philosophy, theological criticism, and song lyrics. Her inventive textual amalgams mix the secular and religious, popular culture and fine art, pain and hope, and include quotes from a range of literary and cultural figures, such as Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, e. e. cummings, Langston Hughes, John Lennon, and Gertrude Stein.
For Kent, printmaking was a populist medium to communicate with the world around her, and her designs were widely disseminated through billboards, book jackets, illustrations, posters, gift cards, and T-shirts. Printmaking allowed Kent to produce a large quantity of original art for those who could not afford to purchase high-priced artworks.
While several exhibitions have focused on Kent’s work from the 1960s, Someday is Now is the first major museum show to survey her entire career, including early abstractions and text pieces as well as the more lyrical works made in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition also includes rarely shown photographs of Kent. Additionally, the PMCA’s Project Room will offer art-making activities for all ages inspired by the art and teachings of Corita Kent, films related to the exhibition, and a reading area. Local artists and educators will lead a special series of workshops for adults and children in the Project Room.
Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent is co-curated by Ian Berry, Dayton Director of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and Michael Duncan, independent curator and art critic, in collaboration with the Corita Art Center, Los Angeles.
