Stay and fight or leave, it’s not possible to do nothing

 Stay and fight or leave, it’s not possible to do nothing

 

I started this series of essays as a critique/review of the recent film, Women Talking based upon the book by the Canadian author Miriam Toews about an isolated old-school Mennonite Colony is a remote area in South America. In the film we’re not sure where the action is taking place. Suffice it to say, the women didn’t either. They have no road map, no knowledge of the language of the region, nor practical skills outside of husbandry.

Of the three options, during a round of voting, stay and do nothing is ruled out, so the conversations revolve around stay and fight or leave. Contemplating this conundrum, I was reminded of Sister Corita.

Sister Corita 1918-1986 was a member of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, a teaching order.

She taught at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, California. This posh area of LA is not the first place one thinks of for a convent and Catholic college, tucked into the Hollywood Hills. Early on in her teaching career Sister Corita was drawn to art. She earned a MA at the University of Southern California in 1951 and in that same year produced a print The Lord is With Thee that won first prize at the California State Fair. I read that she chose the democratic form of print arts because it was something anyone had access to, prints could be made and sold relatively cheaply, anyone could collect and own a piece. She began with serigraphy or screen printing in the mid-1950s with a DIY kit and carved out a studio and workshop space in the basement of the school. Without being pedantic, she used the medium to share God’s love—indeed, her perspective caused the viewer to look closer, lean in deeper to her underlying meaning.

The college’s location and local connections also brought Sister Corita into contact with some of the most radical voices within the art and design community. She collaborated with progressive thinker and dome-builder Buckminster Fuller, with modern furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames, avant-garde composer John Cage, and a host of others. She even had the writer and diarist Anaïs Nin come speak at the college to a roomful of undergraduate women. Despite these friendships she stayed true to her conservative Christian roots. She found that she did not have to compromise her faith or who she was to be included in the broader art world.

In 1962 sister Corita attended the Andy Warhol Soup exhibit at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. This was right at the beginning of Warhol’s career and extracted much head-scratching. Though sign painting in the fine art world was just emerging, the concept of “pop” art was not yet in the common vernacular. The form was perfect for Sister Corita and caught her imagination. It pulled from everyday life, from objects and subjects familiar to almost everyone. Though Warhol became known for his use of screen printing this first show was paintings, all Campbell’s tomato soup cans. He’d return to the Ferus Gallery a year later with his signature screen prints on the same topic. It was Sister Corita who made the jump after that first show to reconsider the world around her and re-vision it using print arts.

Corita began working on Wonderbread. Referencing the transformative power behind the Eucharist, the true Wonderbread, she composed twelve, slightly irregular oval shapes in bright primary colors, set against a white background. She would continue to “play” with commercial representations and spiritual expressions, melding the two to create a new perspective. More importantly she brought in the everyday, the mundane, much like Warhol and the New York School of Poets of that same period, using common quotidian objects, raising them up and giving them sacred attention.

In 1964 Sister Corita was in charge of organizing the annual Mary’s Day. At Immaculate Heart College Mary’s Day was a tradition celebrating Mary the mother of Jesus and patroness of the order as well as welcoming in Spring—almost like a May Day Festival. In the beginning years the celebration included adoration of a statue of Mary, a parade on the campus grounds followed by a picnic. Never quite stoic, it was a day to be taken seriously—not with Sister Corita in charge.

Preparations began early with Sister Corita involving the art department. She had her students make hand-held frames, with viewfinders—1-inch-by-1-inch squares cut out of cardboard that act as tools to help “take in a little bit of something, so then you can have a better idea and appreciation for the larger whole,” according to Nellie Scott, director of the Corita Art Center.*Sojourners, Finding Solace in the Work of the Pop Art Nun

Artists and activists are still learning from the vision of Corita Kent. August 2021, Cassidy Klein. “She had this act of slow looking.” Sister Corita encouraged her students to walk around and view the world from this restricted lens, opening up a new way of looking. They went to the grocery. They asked their local market to save boxes and produce packaging.  Her theme evolved and emerged from the bounty around the school—keeping in mind the poor and lack of food around the world—to help the girls who occupied a privileged space to focus on the grace and mercies of God.

The traditional Mary’s Day contained all the usual elements of flower crowns and pretty dresses with a few additions. The procession included brightly-colored silk screened banners and the girls carried signs sourced from the fruit and vegetable aisle, what today we might call up-cycled, lending fresh meaning. The signs proclaimed peace and love and Up with Jesus, but also messages to end poverty and the war in Vietnam.

The sisters were also involved in contemporary issues of social justice and emerging conversations around Vatican II taking place in the Church. This would put the order and Sister Corita Kent in the direct crosshairs of the archbishop of Los Angeles.

 

NEXT POST—Stay and Fight?