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Protected: “The Listening Heart: Corita Kent’s Reforming Vision” By Nations Media Oct 20, 2021 In 1962, Sister Mary Corita walked into a West Hollywood gallery to look at paintings of Campbell’s soup cans. Leaning up against the wall at eye level, the paintings had the same colors and shapes and branding as the original cans with only soup names to tell them all apart. Was it a gallery or supermarket? A painting or an advertisement? Andy Warhol was democratizing art in new ways, and it sparked an epiphany for this artist-nun. “Always be ready to see what you haven’t seen before,” Sister Mary Corita Kent said. It’s how we “make contact with what is really there, uncluttered by old thoughts and prejudices.” If paintings of soup cans could be art, then what about the art of the church? The same year, Pope John XXIII began Vatican II, a reforming movement to “open the windows of the church to let in some fresh air.” Church worlds and art worlds were opening new doors to the ordinary. What would happen when this artist nun walked through? Sister Mary Corita was already an accomplished artist. She built up layers of thick color and texture in her screenprints of biblical scenes, and she even won an award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the lord is with thee (1952), print referencing the Annunciation, praying the rosary, and the Virgin Mary. But after seeing those soup cans, you can see a dramatic shift in her artmaking. She went back to her print studio and started looking at another common food: sliced bread. In wonderbread (1962), she printed twelve bright wobbly circles on the page based on the packaging. It reminded her of the Eucharist, and copying it twelve times evoked the liturgical year. It’s a playful meditation on sacred time, wonder, and communion—a different kind of bread inspiring our imaginations year after year.But pause here a minute and hold these two images in your mind: a print of the Virgin Mary and a print of bright blotchy circles. Can they both be religious art? Sister Corita and a community of nuns at Immaculate College said yes. They threw open the windows of the church looking for some fresh air, and it was ultimately so threatening to the Los Angeles Diocese that they closed the school—and led this artist and educator to a crisis of faith. Of course it’s easy to see how the lord is with thee is religious art. It illustrates a religious scene and we imagine how it might function within a worship setting. It makes sense on Sunday morning. But if we saw wonderbread hanging behind the pulpit, we might scratch our heads. That confusion is natural, and it comes from a lack of knowledge. Church folk often just don’t know that the contemporary art world made an exciting expansion in what it means to make and enjoy art. Art doesn’t just have to illustrate something. The process and materials can become part of the meaning. That’s the key to wonderbread and all the work that emerges from Sister Mary Corita’s studio. She became interested not in depicting scenes from the Bible but answering this: what might happen if a Christian imagination engaged the world around us through the arts? That art might look less like an illustration from a Children’s Bible and more like an artist enriching the world through curiosity and compassion, through seeing the stuff of life—even a bread bag—as dialogue partners with mysteries of faith. Let’s look at another example. At first glance the two silkscreens (give the gang) the clue is in the signs (1966) and (our best) reality proves very little (1966) don’t illustrate theology or scripture. You wouldn’t see this hanging in a sanctuary next to the altar, but I’d say this is deeply Christian work, the result of humility, curiosity, and a reforming imagination. Sister Mary Corita’s bright colors and blocky warped letters spread across the page in all directions. We’re not looking at a message as much as visual impressions of words, and everything folds on top of one another in a dizzying texture of primary colors. Can you tell what the big letters say? “Give the gang our best,” a common informal greeting between friends at the time. But this nun found the phrase in a soda ad in a magazine. And then there’s the smaller texts, handwritten notes from the nun herself, this time quotes from her priest friend Daniel Berrigan:The clue is in the “signs” which reveal themselves to the listening heart, and so reprove our unmortified tamperings. Such signs lead to further questions, in the nature of things. The road does not reach its end when an answer is near; it forks out in two or five or a hundred new directions.Reality proves very little: it indicates a great deal, by way of epiphany of signs which always accompany mystery like the influence cast off by radioactive material. Knowledge therefore has all the imprecision of involvement, rather than the “clarity and distinctness” of logic. Sign up for our newsletter to receive the latest stories and exclusive updates Thank you for joining us. Email JOIN Father Berrigan is talking about how things mean, how communication happens in a media-saturated world. By way of “epiphany” (remember the Annunciation?), we are led into deepening and expanding questions about the nature of all things. Whew—that’s some whiplash for you. You could say the advertisement deforms relational words into marketing copy to sell drinks. But Sister Mary Corita reforms them. She brings those words back onto the page, tweaking and playing with them and putting them in dialogue with the words of a priest. The phrase “give the gang our best” started as a greeting, flattened into an advertisement, and through a creative process it becomes a phrase that makes us think about generosity and the unexpected grace that can flow between friends. What does it mean to give our best to those we care about? What does generosity look like outside of the decaying habits of capitalism? What exactly is our best and how do we access it? Artworks that illustrate biblical scenes or theological ideas are fine, but do you see how much richer this can be? These prints are records of her curiosity, a dialogue between public space and her own prayerful disposition. This doesn’t depict a religious scene, but the process and the reflection she inspires are evidence of a reforming imagination, and we can join in—as artists, as appreciators, and as people. “The clue is in the “signs” which reveal themselves to the listening heart, and so reprove our unmortified tamperings. Such signs lead to further questions, in the nature of things.” And Sister Mary Corita wasn’t just making prints. Art is not just the object for sale in the window or on the gallery wall. Art is about community, about inspiring people to see the world in fresh ways, and the mutual curiosity about what might happen when we make things together. Not only was she teaching and making prints, she was also in regular conversation with people beyond the traditional boundaries of the church. She brought filmmakers and thinkers to the school to lecture and befriend students. People like Alfred Hitchcock, Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller, and many more. And when the school asked her to lead the annual May Day parade, she reformed that too, turning a suffocatingly serious liturgy into a joyful and expressive parade complete with handmade cardboard signs and flags.All of this started from Sister Mary Corita reforming the church’s vision of the arts. Opening the doors and windows and letting in fresh air. And it was too much for the LA Diocese. Threatened by her attention and provocative art, they put so much pressure on Sister Mary Corita and the nuns of Immaculate College, that they were forced to disband. Sister Mary Corita became Corita, leaving the church and habit behind for a quiet life in Boston. It was only six years after a fellow Catholic artist’s paintings of soup cans. In a late interview, Corita reflected on a maple tree growing outside her window: “It seems a great new stage for me – whether it will ever be recognizable by anyone else I don’t know, but I feel that great new things are happening very quietly inside of me. And I know these things have a way, like the maple tree, of finally bursting out in some form.”As she settled into a drastically new life, she stopped her trademark printmaking and started painting childlike watercolors. She still stayed in touch with the Immaculate Heart community and even experimented with “Evenings with God,” a series of “happenings” that brought artists and songwriters and theologians into unexpected conversations. Corita was fond of sharing the Balinese proverb “we have no art—we do everything as well as we can.” It’s a simple phrase that reminded her, her students, and now us that if we let go of our ideas of what art should be, we’re free to focus on the process of making it together. What if church communities followed Corita’s lead and focused less on what art illustrates and more on the creative process that makes it possible? What might burst into bloom? Michael WrightMichael Wright is a Minneapolis-based writer focusing on art, spirituality, and religion. He’s a story strategist for Open Book, and he writes Still Life, a weekly letter on art and spirit. Find him on Twitter and Instagram at @bymichaelwright.