The Judson Gallery of Contemporary and Traditional Art
DAVID JUDSON, DIRECTOR
Presents in the Main Gallery

Curated by Prof. Ronald E. Steen, Art Historian and Art Educator

     Corita (1918-1986 aka Sister Mary Corita and Corita Kent) gained international fame for her vibrant serigraphs during the 1960s and 1970s.  A Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary from 1936, she ran the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles until 1968 when she left her religious community and moved to Boston.  Corita’s art reflects her spirituality, her commitment to social justice, her hope for peace and her fascination with life and the world around her.  Her artistic aesthetic is characterized by the use of popular culture, such as song lyrics, literary sources and advertising slogans as raw material for meaning-filled bursts of text and color produced in limited edition serigraphs.
     This exhibition presents work which illuminates her career and historical impact by including a work from every year of her distinguished 34 year career.  During her career she produced about 771 works of art, serigraphs produced subsequently in limited editions, which is an average of 23 individual art works a year.  In years where her production level was higher than 29 works, such as 1960 (41), 1962 (39), 1963 (52), 1964 (32), 1965 (56), 1966 (34), 1968 (63), 1969 (29), 1976 (30) and 1983 (47), more than one work is shown in the exhibition for that year.

PUBLIC OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, October 11, 2008, 7-10 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Monday, October 13, 2008 through Saturday, January 10, 2009
Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. 10 to 3, and 2nd Saturdays, 7-10 p.m.

     Frances Elizabeth Kent was born on November 20, 1918 in Fort Dodge, Iowa, the fifth of six children. Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was a small child and Frances was educated through the Los Angeles parochial school system. At eighteen, she joined the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, taking the name Sister Mary Corita – Corita meaning “little heart.”
     Around 1945, after teaching elementary school in Canada for nearly 4 years, Corita returned to Los Angeles to teach art at the Immaculate Heart College art department. The colorful and charismatic department chair, Sr. Magdalene Mary had received a degree in Art History from UCLA, so Corita completed her Masters of Art History at USC to bring another perspective to the Immaculate Heart College program. Her last semester there, Corita took a silkscreen, or serigraphy, class and began producing limited edition prints in 1951. In 1952, she entered her piece the lord is with thee in the Los Angeles County Museum exhibition and it won first prize for printmaking. It also won first prize at the California State Fair, effectively launching Corita’s career as an artist.
     This retrospective exhibition, with examples from each year that Corita produced art, not only examines the changes in Corita’s art, it also illuminates the enduring themes and concerns behind the work.
     Corita’s earliest serigraphs, overtly religious in nature, were conventional in subject matter only. Corita adopted a Byzantine aesthetic in her search for strong forms -- quite a departure from the idealized portraiture popular in Catholic art of the 1950s. Although these early complex, multi-layered representational pieces evoke old-world stained glass windows and hand-lettered Bibles, Corita introduced uniquely modern elements, such as the Eames chairs in at cana of galilee.
     Through the end of the 1950s into the early 1960s, Corita continued to explore and redefine her notion of the figurative. She admired the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and gradually the images in her own art become more abstract as she turned to indeterminate shapes and colors to evoke the subject of the pieces. These abstract expressionist pieces sometimes used words, sometimes not. Although the words in these cases often explain or describe the play of form and color (red sea, liquid fire) Corita saw the letters themselves as formal, aesthetic objects. Hi from 1963 suggests the tipping point, a brief moment of parity between letter and abstract shape.
     By 1964, the words had won. For the next several years, large graphics from supermarket and traffic signs, advertising slogans, song lyrics and poetry in Corita¹s unmistakable handwriting danced in bright colors across white paper expanses.  She created the illusion of movement in the letters by making stencils from photographs of words that she bent by laying them up stairs or wrapping them around corners.  (who came out of the water, one way)
     Art expresses what the artist sees and believes. And so by the end of the 1960s, Corita, a woman of conscience practicing an active faith, living on a college campus where youthful idealism ran high, was producing progressively bold political statements. She reintroduced images to her work--viscerally compelling expressions of her passionate cries for an end to war, often using photographs taken directly from front page news, saturated with color and supported by lots of text. (manflowers, in memory of rfk, you shoot at yourself America, pieta). In 1968 Corita took a sabbatical from the college. She never returned.
     Although Corita’s work had been getting progressively simpler over the years, the 1970s marked an abrupt change in its complexity. After leaving Los Angeles, Corita settled in Boston where she devoted herself to art full-time. Along with her own work, she produced commissioned pieces for a multitude of commercial and nonprofit organizations such as Westinghouse and Amnesty International. Her personal work through the 1970s picked up the experiments begun in the late 1950s, of the interplay between color, text, image and abstraction, but with fewer variables. Pieces such as  an unfolding, and you can never lose me exemplify her use of repeated patterns to provide a constant against varying colors.
     Looking closely, seeing differently, these are the hallmarks of Corita’s work. She concerned herself first and foremost with form -- colors, shapes, images, text, and how these elements take up space on a page. And by reframing objects – through changes to their size, shape, direction, by surprising juxtapositions and combinations – she created profound, often provocative, visual statements.

………..and In the Hall Gallery

	Watercolors: A Survey

     Corita produced in water color medium, serial studies for her serigraphs as part of her inventive creative process.  In addition she created individual water colors focusing on themes of mountains, trees, plains, water, horizons, still-life, the seasons, abstraction, color and some incorporating text as finished works of art.  These works having never been widely showcased prior, will be on exhibition for educational purposes, aesthetic enjoyment and with some available for collectors.

ART EDUCATION PROGRAMS

“Looking, Verses, Leaping”
Join us for a lively exploration of Corita’s art.  An engagement in Corita-inspired looking games and art-making designed to foster exciting surprises, joyful connections and
lots of fun!
With Sasha Carrera, Director, Corita Art Center & Corrie Siegel, Assistant to the Director
Saturday, November 8, 2008, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.
$10 per person.  Minimum 25, maximum 30 registrants.
Advance reservations & payment required, deadline Oct. 31st.  Call Mon.-Fri. 9-1
(800) 445-8376

“Corita’s Watercolor: Perspective and Practice”
Investigate how the medium of watercolor altered Corita’s artistic process and product
as you explore watercolor techniques through personal practice.
This workshop is intended for beginning and intermediate watercolor artists.
With Corrie Siegel, Assistant to the Director of the Corita Art Center.
Saturday, November 15, 2008, 1:30 to 4 p.m.
$15 including materials, per person.  Minimum 25, maximum 30 registrants.
Advance reservations & payment required, deadline Nov. 7th.  Call Mon.-Fri. 9-1
(800) 445-8376

Group Tours: Corita Exhibition & The Judson Studios Workshop
Tour format approx. 1 hr. $5.00 per person. Call Mon.-Fri. 9-1, (800) 445-8376

Illustrations
Corita, “enriched bread”, 1965, Serigraph on pellon paper, 29 ¾” x 36 ¼”
Corita, “tulips”, n.d., Watercolor on paper, 10” x 8”
Corita, “One of five extant studies for the serigraph, the world is my valentine”, 1983,
Watercolor on paper, 9” x 12”
All reproduction rights reserved