Sister Corita X Third Drawer Down – 06.04.2011

Third Drawer Down is excited to announce the AMAZING collaboration and Sponsor of the Sister Corita exhibition at Neon Parc. The limited edition tea towel will be launched at our friends gallery Neon Parc on May 5th (exhibition runs from May 4 to May 28).

Enriched Bread 1965

Neon Parc is proud to present a selection of works by Sister Corita, in association with The Corita Art Center. Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita, gained international fame for her vibrant serigraphs during the 1960s and 1970s. A Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she ran the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College until 1968 when she left the Order and moved to Boston. Corita’s art reflects her spirituality, her commitment to social justice, her hope for peace, and her delight in the world that takes place all around us.

Corita was born Frances Kent in 1918 in Fort Dodge, Iowa. She grew up in Los Angeles and joined the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936, taking the name Sister Mary Corita. Corita graduated from Immaculate Heart College in 1941.In 1945, she was sent to teach grade school in British Columbia, but was brought back to Immaculate Heart College in 1947 to teach art. In 1951, she received a master ’s degree in art history from the University of Southern California; it is also the year she exhibited her first silkscreen print. While Corita’s earliest works were largely iconographic — borrowing phrases and depicting images from the Bible, by the 1960s, she was using popular culture (such as song lyrics and advertising slogans) as raw material for her meaning-filled bursts of text and color.

In 1965 her students' “Peace on Earth” Christmas exhibit in IBM’s New York show room was seen as too subversive and Corita had to amend it. Corita ’s cries for peace in the era of Vietnam were not always welcome. This did not deter the sister, who devoted more time to her time to her art and her teachings.

Buckminster Fuller described his visit to Sister Corita’s department as “among the most fundamentally inspiring experiences of my life.” Other influential friends of hers included Charles Eames, Ben Shahn, Harvey Cox and the Berrigan brothers. While Corita’s personal collection of prints went to the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts at the UCLA HAmmer Museum, she willed her unsold prints, paintings and the copyrights of her works to the Immaculate Heart Community. Her works has been widely exhibited and collected the world over, including exhibitions in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany. This will be the first exhibition of her work in Melbourne, Australia

For more information and print-ready images contact: Neon Parc