After briefly teaching grade school in British Columbia, Canada, Corita was brought back to Los Angeles in 1945 to join the art department faculty at Immaculate Heart College while simultaneously earning a master's degree in art history from the University of Southern California. Corita was already experimenting with silkscreen printing kits and before graduating in 1951, Corita took a screen printing class at USC. The next year she won first-place awards for printmaking from both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California State Fair with her first art fair entry, the lord is with thee.
Corita's early work was religious in content, reflecting the importance of art in the life of the Church historically, as both an educational and devotional instrument. From the outset, however, her art was at odds with the Church's aesthetic preferences.After Pope Pius X's 1910 "Oath against Modernity" (which was administered to clergy leaders until 1967), "religious" art was equated with imitations of seventeenth-century Baroque realism. By the 1950s, mass-produced color reproductions and prayer cards with idealized images of the Holy Family and the saints were ubiquitous.
To make religious art that was not, in her words, as "repulsive," Corita adopted the "strong forms"inspired by Byzantine art. At the same time, Corita engaged with contemporary culture both ideologically and aesthetically. Her early figurative works echo Ben Shahn's flat, stylized human forms and overlapping transparent planes. Like Shahn (whom she admired) Corita chose to feature dramatic moments, rife with narrative and symbolism. Her bold lines and use of text also recall Shahn's work, as would her eventual focus on social justice and bold graphics.
Figurative art had been a struggle for Corita in both finding an aesthetic that pleased her and in navigating the dictates of the Church. In Within the progressive educational environment of Immaculate HeartCollege, she explored contemporary abstraction, discovering that she felt much more "at home with ... the loose forms and the simplicity" of Abstract Expressionism. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Corita and her mentor, Magdalene Mary, the chair of the Immaculate College art department, made yearly trips to New York, which enabled her to keep up with the contemporary art scene.
Her work of the early 1960s reveals the impact of painters Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Adolph Gottlieb, whose art Corita had seen in person. She shared with them a desire to reveal the transcendent and the sublime. Echoing the monumental scale of contemporary painting, Corita began working with very large screens, incorporating amorphous shapes and opulent, evocative colors favored by the trio. These works provoke a direct, emotive response by casting viewers as participants. This new experiential approach corroborated both Corita's role as teacher and the engaged, living Catholicism of the Immaculate Hearts. It also illustrates two emerging themes in Corita's work—that of activating her audience and of blurring the lines between the sacred and profane to reveal the holy in the mundane.
From the Gospel of John equating the Word with Christ to the traditions of calligraphy and illuminated bibles, words have had a unique place in the aesthetic history of the Church. Corita likened her use of words to the traditional American folk art of needlepoint samplers. She saw letters as formal objects and valued them primarily for their looks, but her use of text, strategically positioned over abstract color masses, also provides an intellectual message beyond the emotional appeal of color and form.
In her teaching, Corita stressed the importance of close, sustained looking. Her use of words in her art furthers this goal by encouraging viewers to spend more time contemplating each image. Like her subject matter, Corita's choice of text gradually expanded beyond purely scriptural and theological to include poetry, literature, and, eventually, the rhetoric of the marketplace.
Looking closely from different perspectives in different combinations was perhaps Corita's primary lesson as a teacher. And in the early-to-mid-1960s it seemed much of the Western world was doing exactly that. Americans began to challenge the social norms and institutionalized inequality of segregation. The Catholic Church began redefining its role for the modern world in Vatican I. The pop art, performance art, and earth art movements overturned traditional conceptions of art. Moving away from abstract expressionist modes that seemed to eschew the celebration of the everyday, Corita turned to aesthetic strategies that sought to reach the widest possible audience. In a 1964 interview with Adolph Gottlieb, she aligned herself first and foremost as a teacher whose job it was to “infiltrate the masses” and serve as a “bridge between artists and students.”
In 1964, Corita became head of the Immaculate Heart art department and developed the "Great Men Series," bringing renowned figures like Buckminster Fuller, Leonard Stein, and John Cage to lecture at the campus. May of 1964 marked Corita's first year of organizing the college's annual Mary's Day. The Immaculate Heart Community and College were very progressive and carried a strong social consciousness in their outlooks and policies. And so, when Corita invited her students to brainstorm the celebration of Mary's Day, they decided on the theme of world hunger. Led by Corita's art department, the entire college participated in creating a temporary outdoor exhibition that included billboards and grocery store signage and posters. Hung on college buildings and fencing, this display was the setting for the processional, in which students carried placards made from supermarket posters and bearing text that advertised God and an end to world hunger.
Although she had occasionally drawn from the marketplace in her serigraphs starting in 1962, by 1964 Corita's primary sources became billboards and advertisements. She continued to work in silkscreen, which she valued as a democratic medium. She cropped, fragmented, reversed, and rotated texts from billboards, street signs, and advertisements, combining them collage-style with hand-lettered or written literary passages. Photographs of Mary's Day banners waving in the wind inspired Corita to introduce typographic distortions, which added motion and a three-dimensional sense of space to the text-based compositions. Through these manipulations of words, Corita questioned, redefined, and injected commercial-speak with spiritual meaning.
In a 1965 essay entitled “Art and Beauty in the Life of a Sister,” Corita demonstrated how advertisements could be read as modern day allegories. Her serigraphs achieved spiritual interpretations through their strategic excerpts and arrangements of texts that read metaphorically as well as literally. Unlike Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, or James Rosenquist—pop artists that seemed to elevate commodity objects and popular culture with a kind of cool detachment—Corita's adaptations not only extolled humanist values but also sought to incite viewers to action.
In 1970, Corita settled into an apartment in Boston's Back Bay. For the first time in her life, she was living alone and had no other job but making art. She supported herself with commissions for groups like Westinghouse, DigitalEquipment Corporation, Amnesty International, and the International Walk forHunger while she continued producing, exhibiting, and selling her own art.
While these works exemplify some of the minimalist elements of their era—exhibiting a softer color palette and simple designs—they continued to express Corita's humanist spirituality. As always, she drew subject matter and images from her surroundings, expressing them through a new filter of solitude and introspection.
An avid watercolorist, Corita took day trips with a friend, painting in the environs of Boston and Cape Cod. She also continued exploring the uses of photography in her prints. Photographs of found objects would be enlarged past recognition and used as stencils for screens. She made serigraphs from photographs of her watercolors, creating an effect of flattened, separated colors, and brushstrokes.
Words continued to play a crucial role in her compositions; her broadening choice of literature extending to sources like the Bhagavad-Gita and Carl Jung. In 1971,Boston Gas commissioned Corita's largest work: a 150-square-foot rainbow swash over a gas tank located near Boston's Southeast Expressway. Initially the design aroused controversy among members of the public who imagined the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh's profile in the blue swash. Subsequently, the gas tank became a Boston landmark, and the public demanded that the rainbow be repainted when the tower was replaced in 1992. Corita's smallest design, another rainbow swash, was the United States Postal Service's 1985 Love Stamp.
In 1986, Corita succumbed to cancer. She willed her unsold serigraphs to her former sisters of the Immaculate Heart Community who founded the Corita Art Center to preserve and promote Corita's work. Her own collection of prints went to the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts at theHammer Museum in Los Angeles, Corita's prints are part of the permanent collections of many museums including the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany.
Photography was an important part of Corita’s artistic practice, technical process, and pedagogy. She was a prolific photographer and amassed a collection of over 15,000 35mm slides that closely documented her immediate surroundings. Corita’s prints incorporated images of street signs and billboards as well as magazine and newspaper headlines, reflecting the changing urban conditions and rapidly evolving media environment of the sixties. The camera lens inspired Corita tore-frame and examine the smaller, overlooked details in a larger landscape. She often had her students use “viewfinders”—empty 35mm slide holders—as tools to “take things out of context,” allowing them to “see for the sake of seeing.”
In works such as stop the bombing (1967) and yellow submarine (1967), Corita employed an innovative stencil technique that consisted of projecting images of manipulated text and imagery onto large sheets of paper, then tracing and cutting the forms to use as stencils in her screens. The same process was used for works like one way (1967) and right (1967), which reveal Corita’s idiosyncratic relationship to language, signs, and meaning. Here, the directives of street signage—normally meant to clearly convey information—are layered, cropped, reversed, turned upside down, and made difficult to read. The dynamic movement of the letterforms and abstract shapes in many of these prints was achieved through the confluence of Corita’s physical manipulations to the source imagery and her unique photographic perspective on the world around her.
Until 1967, Corita was producing prints at the college studio during the two weeks between the summer term and the fall semester. Assisted by students, colleagues, and friends, Corita, a notorious insomniac, worked around the clock. Sometime in 1967, she would start working exclusively with printer Harry Hambly in Santa Clara, sending him materials by mail. This epistolary relationship continued throughout Corita’s life and the use of collage would become an essential part of the production process.