Artist: Laura Brown
Title: Let the Sun Shine In
Medium: Three color screen print on Neenah Sundance paper
Size: 18” x 24”
Year: 2015
Woman Represented: Sister Corita Kent
Statement:
“I really love the look of letters—the letters themselves become a kind of subject matter even apart from their meaning.”
These words get right to the core of Sister Corita Kent’s creative work. As a nun, artist, educator, and activist, Corita made over 800 prints in her lifetime, and contributed a unique voice to the Pop art movement. Much of her work drew from print advertising and popular culture, which she used as commentary of the issues of war, race, feminism, and the then-turbulent Catholic Church. She worked completely by hand, freely composing her prints using a huge range of text, colors, and shapes.
In the last few years, her work has had a huge revival in popularity, and it’s no wonder. Her themes of love, hope, and “giving a damn about your fellow man” are as applicable now as they were in the 1960’s. An exhibition of her work, “Someday is Now”, is currently traveling throughout the United States.
I discovered her work several years ago and instantly felt a kindred connection (and not just because I often feel like a nun printmaker myself). With her use of bright colors, text, and abstract shapes, Corita’s prints immediately drew me in and her meditations on teaching—including her “Ten Rules for Teachers and Students”—became words to live and make by.
Let the Sun Shine In was text Corita originally used in a 1968 print, which also featured a portrait of Pope John XXIII. Addressing her reaction to the uproar over Vatican II, it also contained a quote from rabbi and activist Arthur Waskow, “the creative revolution—to take a chunk of the imagined future and put it in the present—to follow the law of the future and live in the present.”
Though my interpretation of the text is simpler and more lighthearted, I like to think Corita would approve. I chose it thinking especially of the dark Minnesota winter, and of her Rule #9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
