Corita Kent
dal 18/1/2013 al 27/7/2013
Segnalato da
18/1/2013
Corita Kent
Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga
Someday Is Now. Throughout her rich and varied career, she made thousands of posters, murals, and signature serigraphs that combine her passions for faith and politics. Reflecting larger questions and concerns of the 1960s, her images remain iconic symbols of that turbulent time.
Co-curated by Tang Malloy, Ian Berry, Michael Duncan
Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent is the first full-scale survey of more than thirty years of work by Corita Kent (1918–1986). A teacher at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles and a civil rights, feminist, and anti-war activist, Kent was one of the most popular American graphic artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
Throughout her rich and varied career, she made thousands of posters, murals, and signature serigraphs that combine her passions for faith and politics. Reflecting larger questions and concerns of the 1960s, her images remain iconic symbols of that turbulent time. Kent’s earnest, collaborative approach to art-making—combining faith, politics, and teaching with messages of acceptance and hope—continues to be a potent influence for many artists working today.
In 1946, Kent began teaching art at Immaculate Heart College, where she fostered a creative and collaborative arts community and developed a life-long interest in printmaking. At IHC, she developed her hallmark mixture of bold, bright imagery and provocative texts that she extracted from a range of cultural sources, including: advertising slogans; street and grocery store signage; poetry; scripture; newspapers and magazines; philosophy; theological criticism; and song lyrics.
Her ingenious textual amalgams mix the secular and religious, popular culture and fine art, pain and hope, and include quotes from a range of literary and cultural figures such as Samuel Beckett, Paul Camus, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, John Lennon, and Gertrude Stein.
With an ear for language rivaling that of her contemporary, Ed Ruscha, Kent proclaimed her upbeat theology in prints that re-purpose well-known advertising phrases of the time such as “The big G stands for goodness” (General Mills) and “Put a tiger in your tank” (Esso gasoline). As theologian and friend Harvey Cox noted, “She could pass her hands over the commonest of the everyday, the superficial, the oh-so-ordinary, and make it a vehicle of the luminous, the only, and the hope filled.”
For Kent, printmaking was a populist medium to communicate with the world around her, and her designs were widely disseminated through billboards, book jackets, illustrations, posters, gift-cards, and T-shirts. As she explained, “it [printmaking] enables me to produce a quantity of original art for those who cannot afford to purchase high-priced art…the distribution of these prints to everyday places of work pleases me, and I hope they will give people a lift.” This activist spirit permeated Kent’s life.
Her posters and murals asked philosophical questions about racism, poverty, military brutalities in Vietnam, and conflicts between radical and conservative positions inside the Catholic Church. Works such as 1969’s manflowers touch directly on the brutalities of the war in Vietnam. In the print, Kent juxtaposed the texts “man power!” and “Where have all the flowers gone?” against an image of two injured young soldiers and bright green and purple blocks of color. Speaking to her aim to address the stark realities of the world with messages of hope and joy, Kent explained: “It is a huge danger to pretend awful things do not happen. But you need enough hope to keep on going. I am trying to make hope. And you have to grab it where you can.”
While several exhibitions have focused on Kent’s 1960s serigraphs, Someday is Now is the first major museum show to survey her entire career, including early abstractions and text pieces as well as the more lyrical works made in the 1970s and 1980s.
Co-curated by Tang Malloy Curator Ian Berry and independent curator Michael Duncan, the exhibition includes over 200 serigraph prints, drawings, and paintings, as well as rarely exhibited photographs Kent used for teaching and documentary purposes. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue featuring new scholarship, interviews with former students and collaborators, and responses from a wide variety of artists, curators, and designers.
Contact
Barbara Schrade
Community Relations Manager
Store Manager
518-580-5530
bschrade@skidmore.edu
Opening: 19 January 2013
Tang Teaching Museum
815 North Broadway, Saratoga, NY
Museum Hours:
Tuesday - Sunday 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Thursdays open until 9:00 pm
Closed Mondays and major holidays
Admission:
Suggested Donations:
Adults: $5.00
Children over 12: $3.00
Seniors: $2.00
Students, children under 12 years of age and Friends of Tang members are FREE