‘There is a bullet in my brain’: the searing art of Hollywood nun Sister Mary Corita

She tackled the brutalities and violence of the Vietnam war – and the racist response to the Watts Uprising in LA. If Sister Corita held her viewfinder up to today’s world, what would it show us?

The news cycle operates at such a rapid pace, it can feel impossible to take everything in, leaving us overwhelmed, exhausted, and at times helpless. The Hollywood-based nun, artist and teacher Sister Mary Corita (AKA Corita Kent) understood this. She lived and worked through the 1960s, also a time of immense political change and drastic historical events. She used her art and ideas to help make sense of it. As she said to a group of students in 1967: “Sometimes you can take the whole of the world in, and sometimes you need a small piece to take in. I think that is really what a work of art is: it is a small piece that you can ingest, that gives you an idea of the richness of the whole.”

Sister Corita’s art reflected the idea of the small and big picture. She worked in screen-printing, a medium that lends itself to being widely accessible and available, and can be produced in bulk, creating text-based works in bright, bold colouring. She often led with a recognisable phrase or slogan, framed by smaller, almost illegible text, which invited her viewer to look more closely at the commentaries she included.

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