“I think celebrations are always meant to instruct and inspire, to empower people to use their own creative skills through images and ritual to action.” — Corita Kent

Unordinary Days: Celebration as Joy and Resistance explores how celebration inspired Corita’s art and the community of Immaculate Heart College, where she taught and led the art department from 1964 to 1968. IHC students and faculty approached celebration as a collaborative process that brought together ritual and collective making with a growing awareness of the era's social and humanitarian concerns.

The school’s annual Mary’s Day celebration was a central site for creative experimentation. Historically rooted in the Catholic tradition of May crownings and Marian processions, the religious observance was reimagined by the college in the 1960s. Within this context, the figure of the Virgin Mary was recast not as a distant icon but as a presence within everyday life—an embodiment of empathy and care, who "laughed out loud."

These ideas found their most vivid expression in the 1964 Mary's Day festivities. Under Corita’s creative guidance, vibrant handmade banners, stacked box towers, and procession signage animated the campus, drawing on imagery from advertising, commercial packaging, and notably, the news. These visual strategies connected religious tradition with the urgent realities of the decade, incorporating references to hunger, poverty, war, and civil rights alongside messages of compassion and shared responsibility. This perspective also shaped Corita’s own artistic output, where Marian imagery was reinterpreted through the visual language of contemporary life.

Highlighting the generative role of celebration at Immaculate Heart College and within Corita’s artistic practice, Unordinary Days brings together a selection of her iconic serigraphs alongside photography, films, and archival ephemera that trace the Mary’s Day celebrations and the creative community that brought them to life.

‍