Sister Corita (1918-1986) was an artist and an educator who worked in Los Angeles and Boston. Her artwork, with its messages of love and peace, was particularly popular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. As a pop artist, Corita primarily focused on text and vibrant color, manipulated type and images appropriated from the newly burgeoning consumer culture of her era. Corita created several hundred serigraph designs, for posters, book covers, and murals. The retrospective exhibition Sister Corita: Let The Sun Shine In at Circle Culture Gallery in Berlin (Germany) documents Corita’s practice during over 30 years which she spent in Los Angeles, where she produced a variety of serigraph or screen-printed images. Corita’s work is collected worldwide, notably by the The Whitney, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In this video we attend the opening reception of the exhibition, and the curators Sasha Carrera (Director of the Corita Art Center) and Aaron Rose (film director) provide us with an introduction to the exhibition. The show runs until May 10, 2014.

Corita was born Frances Kent in 1918 in Fort Dodge, Iowa. She grew up in Los Angeles and joined the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936, She graduated from Immaculate Heart College in 1941. In 1946 she returned to Immaculate Heart College to teach art. In 1951, she graduated from the University of Southern California where she received a master’s degree in art history from; In this year she also exhibited her first silkscreen print.

Sister Corita: Let The Sun Shine In. Retrospective at the Circle Culture Gallery, Berlin (Germany); Interview with Sasha Carrera (Director of the Corita Art Center) and Aaron Rose; February 22, 2014. Video and interview by Frantisek Zachoval.

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