Rebel nun Sister Corita Kent took a cue from Andy Warhol and turned the Sixties counterculture into divine Pop Art with a message. Feature by David Bramwell. Images courtesy of Corita Art Center Los Angeles

On 15 August 1964, hundreds of women with flowers in their hair, and sporting their most colourful attire and biggest hats, processed through Hollywood carrying Pop Art banners adorned with messages of love and peace. Amid the crowds, balloons and streamers could be heard the sounds of bells, singing and poetry readings. Television cameras were there to capture the momentous occasion.

This was a ground-breaking event, paving the way for hippie happenings and the Human Be-In at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 1967, when 30,000 people showed up to see bands, beat poets, mystics and LSD guru Timothy Leary, who would famously advise the crowd to “turn on, tune in, drop out”. But while these latter events were organised by the rebellious forces of the counterculture, what also makes the happening of 1964 unprecedented is that it was orchestrated by a nun.

According to the author and magician Alan Moore, one way of defining magic is “the intentional manipulation of consciousness”. Moore reminds us that spells and grimoires are just another way of saying “spelling” and “grammar”. Every speech, every novel, every joke, every Tweet, every diatribe and every text is a subtle act of magick, whether we realise it or not.

For Moore, one of the most insidious and powerful forms of magick is advertising. We spend our waking hours being subjected to hundreds of commercials, billboards and website banners. But what if we turned the problem on its head and found a way to use advertising for our own means? In 1960s California a nun did exactly that; through the alchemy of art she subverted glib slogans into uplifting and spiritual messages, creating “advertisements for the common good”. Time to properly introduce Sister Corita Kent.

Born at the end of the First World War to a deeply religious family, Corita Kent became a nun at 18 and entered the progressive and liberal order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) in Hollywood. Throughout her 20s and 30s she trained parochial school teachers, though her true passion and talent was for art. She attended classes at Otis College of Art & Design, Chouinard Art Institute and the University of Southern California and gained an MA in Art History in 1951. By this time she was teaching in the art department at the IHM. The institute already had a novel approach to art, but after Kent took over as head of department, she radicalised it further, utilising the principles of avant-garde composer John Cage to create a manifesto of ten rules.

Kent was a hard task-master who expected her pupils to work as conscientiously as she did. A popular assignment was to demand 100 questions from her students in response to a film. This was not done to be punishing. Kent knew that after 20 diligently considered questions her pupils would start to get impatient and throw in more broad, philosophical and obscure questions. Like a psychotherapist, Kent was looking for what came out when the intellect was bypassed. It was that 76th question that just might offer a student amazing insights into their true nature.

Kent was a hugely popular teacher. Her enthusiasm, joy and passion for art was infectious. She took her students to the studios of famous artists and invited the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Cocteau, Saul Bass, Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller and John Cage to lecture.

Fascinated by letters, fonts and the everyday slogans that filled the streets and shops of LA, Kent took pupils on day trips to tyre companies, car showrooms and supermarkets, urging them to scrutinise the colours, fonts and phrases found on packaging, road signs, shop fronts and products.

Throughout the fifties Kent’s own art combined the Byzantine style with modernist aesthetics, informing her desire to transform the “repulsive” and archaic nature of religious artwork. Her creations were unique and striking, and she began to be invited to exhibit her work. But it was seeing Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans exhibition in LA’s Ferus Gallery in 1962 that was to have the most profound effect on Kent’s work. After this she “saw everything through Warhol’s eyes” and moved exclusively into screen printing and Pop Art, juxtaposing advertising slogans and brand images with the words of Albert Camus, The Beatles, Alan Watts, Winnie the Pooh, EE Cummings, The Doors, Martin Luther King, and Leonard Cohen. Where Warhol cast a cool, detached eye over the world of mass production, Kent sought the divine in the everyday, creating Pop Art that was inclusive and spiritual.

Her new phase of work began with the creation of a screen print featuring 12 coloured circles taken from the wrapping design of Wonder Bread – an everyday white loaf – together with an extract from an essay by Albert Camus. The Zen-like message of Wonderbread (1962) was that any bread can be holy.

Kent enjoyed experimenting with the way that words appeared on her artwork. She photographed adverts, projected them onto a wall, traced them and manipulated the paper so it appeared folded like a flag, giving the words a living, three-dimensional feel.

One of her biggest pieces, Power Up, combined the bold slogan from a gas company with a sermon from radical priest and poet Daniel Berrigan, who would later be imprisoned for burning draft papers and refusing to serve in the Vietnam War.

Kent came to describe her appropriation of ad slogans as “snitching”. She would spend hours at a time in local supermarkets and businesses examining their products, and pored through the pages of every magazine from Vogue to Playboy in search of means to bring the divine into the secular. In a playful response to Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup, Kent created artwork from Del Monte’s tomato sauce slogan “Make Meatballs Sing”, inserting an excerpt from Psalm 97 within the word “Sing”. Another piece, the juiciest tomato of all, featured the word TOM-ATO in red, yellow and white, split across the top and bottom of the print. Within the giant letters of ATO, Kent included a sermon by poet Samuel A Eisenstein. It began: “The time is always out of joint. If we are provided with a sign that declared Del Monte tomatoes are the juiciest of them all, it is not desecration to add: Mother Mary is the juiciest tomato of them all. Perhaps this is what is meant when the slang term puts it, ‘she’s a peach’.”

As the Sixties progressed, Kent became something of a celebrity. She toured the US lecturing on art, and regularly exhibited in galleries. In 1963 she was commissioned to create a banner for the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. That same year she turned the staid and solemn annual St Mary’s Day parade in Hollywood into a proto-hippy happening full of colour, joy and community spirit. She made the cover of Newsweek (“The Nun: Going Modern”), was featured in Time magazine’s top 100 most influential women of 1966, and 12 months later was named as one of the women of the year by the LA Times.

As an artist, Kent took an egalitarian approach to the sale of her work. She was fond of saying, “Art enhances people’s lives. People need to be able to see it, own it and possess it.” Choosing screen-printing as her medium was a deliberate means of making her art affordable and accessible. While Banksy – never shy of criticising capitalist greed through his work – has made millions from the sales of his limited-edition screen prints, Kent refused to allow her work to be numbered. That way, she could ensure it was priced inexpensively, undermining the art market’s game of charging higher prices for smaller print runs.

In 1968 Kent announced she was taking a six-month sabbatical and headed off to Cape Cod to stay with a friend. Twenty years of teaching, lecturing, exhibiting and chronic insomnia had taken its toll. There was also a deep frustration with the conservative nature of LA’s archdiocese, in particular Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, a stick-in-the-mud killjoy who viewed her work as blasphemous, irresponsible and ugly. Kent never returned, later resigning from her post at IHC and leaving the sisterhood.

While never publicly discussing her frustrations, the art that Kent made from 1968-71 said it all. Free from the constraints of the archdiocese, she took a more overtly political stance and created a series called Heroes & Sheroes, utilising anti-war art and photos from Life and Time magazines, collaged with protest slogans and washed with garish colours. More visceral than Wonderbread or Power Up, this work was angry. “Stop the Bombing”, “Black Is Beautiful”, “Make Love Not War” and other slogans from the counterculture adorned these later works. In response to a 1966 court case in which a mixed-race couple from Virginia called the Lovings were jailed for an illegal marriage, Kent responded with a worked adorned with the words: “To the Lovings, New Hope”.

“I admire people who march,” she said later. “I admire people who go to jail. I don’t have the guts to do that so I do what I can.”

In 1971 Kent received a commission from the city of Boston to paint a gas storage tank on the outskirts of the city. The artwork became known locally as Rainbow Swash, owing to six bold lines of colour that splash over the gas tank and down its sides. At 45 metres high, it remains the largest copyrighted piece of art in the world, seen daily by hundreds of thousands of commuters.

While popular with residents, Rainbow Swash was not without controversy. The Vietnam War, then still raging, had divided opinion in the country, and Kent was a known peace campaigner and activist. Her detractors came to believe she had hidden a subversive image in the blue stripe of colour on the tank. Tailing off into a point, this stripe could pass for anything from a poorly drawn map of South America to a canary. To a significant minority, however, it was clearly the face and pointy beard of Vietnam’s communist leader, Ho Chi Minh.

From hereon, Kent’s art became more abstract, gentle and introspective, losing the boldness and post-modernist appropriation of consumerism of her previous work. It reflected the return to simplicity that such artists as Picasso also sought in later life.

Kent’s final work was created just a year before her death in 1986, when the cancer she had battled for the second half of her life finally took her. A commission from the American postal service led to the printing of 800 million Corita Kent “Love” stamps. The holy trinity of Kent’s world – colour, text and divinity – was distilled into one final form: six bands of colour and one word: LOVE.

During her lifetime Kent made over 700 screen prints, lectured across the US, wrote books, produced films and orchestrated happenings. Like Moondog and Charlie Parker, she took inspiration from the cityscape around her, reflecting it back in her art, and often spoke of her great love for the “clang and clatter of the marvellously unfinished landscape of Los Angeles”. Unlike the cool detachment of the Pop Art scene, her work was inclusive, mischievous, uplifting and joyful. Seeking the prophetic in the secular slogans of advertising, in Kent’s hands even a stock cube ad, “come home to flavour again”, could be transformed into a message of spiritual and familial love.

Corita Kent’s Ten Rules for Art
Consider everything an experiment
Become a microscope
Treat nothing as a mistake; there is no win and no fail, only make
Pull everything out of your teacher
Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think
Remember that all great artists were once amateurs
Always be around. Come or go to everything
Read anything you can get your hands on
Break all the rules. Even your own rules
Find a place you can trust and try trusting it for a while

For more info go to corita.org.

This article is from Idler #89.

Subscribers may comment. Please add your idle thoughts using the box below

Subscribe to the Idler here and get 17% off the shop price plus a FREE copy of Idle Thoughts by Tom Hodgkinson, worth £8.95

“A Drink with the Idler” returns in October

How to Live Like a Stoic

Idler #111 (Aug-Sept 2026) is available in Waitrose, Smiths and TG Jones.

Click here for your nearest stockist.