The Nun of Pop Art

Rebel nun Sister Corita Kent took a cue from Andy Warhol and turned the sixties counterculture into divine Pop Art with a message. David Bramwell sings her praises

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 Corita took over as head of the art department, she radicalised it further, creating a manifesto of ten rules.

Corita 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. Corita 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, Corita 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.

Corita 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.

This is an extract from an article in the March/April issue of the Idler, out now.

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