While Corita's earliest works were largely iconographic -- borrowing phrases and depicting images from the Bible, by the 1960s, she was using popular culture (such as song lyrics and advertising slogans) as raw material for her meaning-filled bursts of text and color.

Corita 's cries for peace in the era of Vietnam were not always welcome.

In 1965 her students' "Peace on Earth" Christmas exhibit in IBM's New York show room was seen as too subversive and Corita had to amend it.

However, her work continued to be an outlet for her activism—in Corita's words:

"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."