Tuesday 21 May 2013

Sister Corita

Rachel Tighe Unit 5 Contextual Influences

Frances Elizabeth Kent, also known as Sister Corita, born on November 20th 1981, was an artist who worked in Boston and LA, America. Her artwork and imagery featured messages of love and peace and features her beliefs and hopes which were shown and exhibited throughout her art work, however were not always welcome at the time of Vietnam. Because of this one of her works in a New York exhibit show room had to be amended as it was seen as too subversive. They were mostly done by silk-screening and serigraphy. It was very popular during the 1960’s and 1970’s where she began to add song lyrics or well-known advertising slogans into her art. She also designed the annual ‘love’ stamp in 1985.

Sister Corita’s work was very vibrant, bright and unique, using quick ‘splashes’ of colour and consisted of several hundred serigraph designs which were used for book covers murals and poster designs. Her earliest work featured phrases and imagery from the Bible which made her beliefs well known through her work. Her unique and distinctive style helped to bring silk screening and serigraph into the world of fine art design.
Sister Corita began in the Roman Catholic order of the ‘Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary’ in LA after she had finished high school. Here she became Sister Mary Corita and earned her BA in 1941 and later became chairman of its art department. During semesters, Sister Corita and her students would work hard to create new serigraph designs for her art. She then went on to colleges of art and design and then at the University of Southern California where she studied the history of art and received a masters degree. She left the Immaculate Heart college in 1968 to move to Boston, where she then devoted her life to creating her art and imagery and created over 400 serigraph images throughout the next 18 years. She began focusing on a lot of floral silk screens which dominated her work for a while. She still created posters and billboards for company’s and social events, but eventually died from cancer in 1986, age 67.

I think that Sister Corita’s work is very bright and eye catching to it’s audience which relates well with her view on hope, peace and beliefs. It is as though she makes her work important looking through her colours so that she gets a message across and shows how strong her beliefs are. I like the way her work looks slightly messy in the way it is presented, but this just seems to make it look more creative and relatable to the artist. The way she creates her imagery and art is very precisely chosen and I think that this is good because it means that she has one method which she is most comfortable with and can use as much as possible, and yet she still experiments with other things, objects, media and phrases or slogans. I hope to use her ideas and media within my own work.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corita_Kent
https://www.corita.org/coritadb/index.php?id=5&option=com_content&task=view

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