From September 26, 2025 to January 24, 2026
Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images offers a vivid immersion into the restless, generous imagination of an artist who believed that seeing was an act of faith and attention. On view from September 26, 2025 to January 24, 2026, the exhibition reveals how Corita Kent transformed the everyday world into a living archive of possibility, where street signs, gestures, celebrations, and accidents became raw material for meaning.
Best known for her radiant serigraphs that fused pop culture, spirituality, and political conviction, Corita Kent occupied a singular place in American art. As a nun, educator, and activist in mid-century Los Angeles, she cultivated a practice rooted in curiosity and empathy. Her classrooms at Immaculate Heart College became laboratories of freedom, where rules were bent and visual language was constantly reimagined. Typography, color, and quotation were not decorative tools but ethical ones, capable of carrying hope, dissent, and compassion.
This exhibition turns attention to a lesser-known but essential aspect of Corita’s work: her vast photographic slide archive. Comprising thousands of images captured between 1955 and 1968, these photographs reveal how attentively she observed her surroundings. Billboards, storefronts, handmade signs, flowers, puppets, and moments of communal ritual all appear as fragments awaiting transformation. Photography functioned not as an end point, but as a gathering practice, a way of collecting visual syllables to be recomposed later into new statements.
Presented as a multi-screen digital projection, the installation echoes Corita’s legendary slide-lecture performances, where images were layered, shuffled, and reconnected in real time. Meaning emerges through juxtaposition rather than hierarchy, reflecting her belief that art is an act of relating rather than isolating. The experience is rhythmic, playful, and deeply human, inviting viewers to follow her associative logic.
Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images ultimately celebrates a way of seeing that resists cynicism. It reminds us that attention can be radical, that joy can be serious, and that the world—looked at closely enough—offers endless material for care, connection, and change.
Image:
© Corita Kent