When 18-year-old Corita Kent entered the Immaculate Heart of Mary women’s religious order in Los Angeles in 1936, she likely never imagined the career that awaited her. Despite her formation in a culture and an institution that expected women religious to be veiled and serve in conventional roles, she became an influential artist. Her life and work were in constant conversation, revealing a dialogue of transformation that was animated by the manipulation of the veil—by a process of veiling and unveiling.
Over the next few decades, Kent experienced an artistic breakthrough largely made possible through her encounter with serigraphy, or screen printing. She became an accomplished serigraph artist whose “artwork evolved from using figurative and religious imagery to incorporating advertising images and slogans, popular song lyrics, biblical verses, and literature,” according to the Corita Art Center. As she maximized her relevance to audiences both religious and secular, she and her work also emerged as symbols of political resilience.
When analyzing Kent’s work, it is vital to understand the role of the veil in both the literal sense of the word and as a metaphor, in her wardrobe and in her medium. It is also crucial to consider the various historical, sociopolitical, religious and personal contexts that surrounded her throughout her career. As a veiled artist, Kent interacted with a veiled medium. In turn, the veiled medium influenced her and her artistic output. Through her cultural technique of veiling, Kent communicated innovative and nuanced ideas. In the process, she unveiled herself.
As a Roman Catholic sister, Kent lived in community with other women who also took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, she and her I.H.M. sisters also wore full religious habits with veils. To better understand Kent’s situated perspective and imagine her as an artist at work, we must recall her circumstances as a woman in a religious order who chose to wear the veil each day. In addition to their function in women’s religious orders, veils play an important role in a variety of religious contexts, from their presence in ceremonial attire to their use in concealing objects and/or spaces that are considered sacred.
The veil has also gained increasing relevance in the field of art history. In an article for The Art Bulletin titled “Beyond the Barrier: The Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic Churches,” Jacqueline Jung discusses how the veil has played a crucial role in structuring sacred architectural spaces. While it may seem that veils serve to hide, or divide, Jung argues otherwise. Through examining choir screens in Gothic churches, Jung suggests that veils have the potential to “[unite] the discrete spaces of choir and nave while simultaneously asserting the integrity of each spatial unit…. [The] screens as architectural structures…are fundamentally complex things fraught with paradox, markers of a highly charged site of transition and passage.”
Veils also operate as sites of passage. For Kent, the presence, modification or absence of the veil in her wardrobe throughout her lifetime signaled moments of transition and resilience. Her manipulation of materials onto the fabric of the silkscreen also communicated such moments.
Proper Matter
An early assignment for Kent was teaching primary school, a common apostolate for women religious at the time. Despite Kent’s limited training in education, she was a natural at teaching. She was also a talented artist. Administrators at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles took notice and invited her to join the faculty of the art department.
Kent began working with silkscreens in 1951 while obtaining a master’s degree in art history from the University of Southern California. During this time, most of her work featured figurative and religious imagery. But the content of her prints evolved over time, partly because of the opportunities that stemmed from the medium itself.
Whether silk, cotton or polyester, the material involved in screen printing is always a framed fabric that the artist uses to transfer ink onto an underlying surface, except in the areas that they have made impermeable by some blocking mechanism (e.g., an image or text cutout, a stencil or glue). The serigrapher can layer ink using several screens to produce a multifaceted print that incorporates assorted colors, images and texts.
When analyzing Kent’s art, it is important to consider how it is constituted through the qualities of the raw materials involved in its creation. This concept, known as medium specificity, comes from the work of the American essayist and art critic Clement Greenberg, who argues that “the unique and proper area of competence of each art [coincides] with all that [is] unique in the nature of its medium.” That is, there is something about the nature and materiality of the screen (in particular, the screen in its meshed and translucent form) that allows it to operate as a veil, creating the conditions for the veiling and unveiling of different kinds of content.
While the medium in serigraphy is literally a screen, it also operates as a veil because it can provide the artist with the terrain needed to obscure and reveal—in other words, to veil and unveil. The serigrapher can use the screen to develop layered pieces saturated with multiple meanings. Resulting prints, then, are mediatic veils of their own.
Veiling as a Cultural Technique
As a serigraph artist, Kent “combined, distorted, and juxtaposed sources all around her,” in the words of the Corita Art Center’s introductory video. For example, Kent’s 1967 work “handle with care” exemplifies her use of commercial language alongside popular poetry and religious messaging.
The print includes large bright green text that reads, “HANDLE WITH CARE!,” overlying warped dark orange text that reads, “SEE THE MAN WHO CAN SAVE YOU THE MOST.” The backdrop of the piece is light orange.
Here, the overtly secular language that we may normally recognize from the side of a packing box (in bright green) veils the religious language (in dark orange) that suggests there is a man who can “save.” In small text off to the side, Kent has inscribed a poem by E. E. Cummings:
no time ago
or else a life
walking in the dark
i met christjesus)my heart
flopped over
and lay still
while he passed(asclose as i’m to you
yes closer
made of nothing
except loneliness
In “handle with care,” Kent’s layering of the bright green text atop the dark orange text comes into stark contrast with the light orange backdrop. This technique leads the viewer to decipher the bright green text first—and with the most ease. The small letters from the Cummings poem are visible only to the viewer who takes the time to encounter the work of art and read closely.
Upon reading the poem, the viewer better understands the entire message of the piece. With its clear invoking of “christ,” the poem helps the viewer uncover the meaning behind the distorted text, originally from a Chevrolet advertisement, that reads “SEE THE MAN WHO CAN SAVE YOU THE MOST.” What first appears as an instruction to “HANDLE WITH CARE!” is in fact an invitation to encounter Jesus Christ, the “MAN WHO CAN SAVE YOU THE MOST.” While Kent superimposes the secular over the religious, the result is one where the secular obscures—but does not cover—the religious, still rendering the religious message accessible.
In his book Cultural Techniques, the German media theorist Bernhard Siegert considers the apparatus of the door and the cultural technique of “dooring.” Siegert discusses how the painter “Robert Campin, who was known also as the Master of Flémalle, demonstrates how the door initiates a sequence of operations that connect the working of the difference between opening and closing with working [of] the difference between the sacred and the profane.” While dooring, through opening and closing, controls access to a sacred space, veiling blends the sacred and profane onto a single plane.
In the context of serigraphy, some lines and layers may perpetuate the distinction between binary categories; the cultural technique of veiling, however, controls the levels of opacity of different ideas and concepts. Veiling does much that dooring does not and cannot do. Veiling lets in and is deliberate about what it leaves out, blurs or obscures. In addition to enabling sites of transition, veiling creates sites of interaction between that which is considered sacred and that which is considered profane.
Surface Tension
The viewer might also consider the “surface tension” that appears in Kent’s work as a site of interaction between different ideas. In her book Surface, the visual art scholar Giuliana Bruno considers the ways that a screen can operate as a “surface to mediate cultural fabrics.” While much of Surface focuses on the nuanced roles of veiling in cinematic and architectural contexts, Bruno’s concept of “surface tension” resonates with any analysis of Kent’s work. She writes that “[whether] the material is canvas, wall or screen, surface tension has emerged as a central condition of contemporary visual art and architecture, signaling a refashioning of materiality and a reinscription of textural movement on our cultural screens.”
Bruno explores the fabric of a cinema screen as a site of connection, partition and negotiation. In an analogous way, Kent uses the silk screen to negotiate the tensions found in the “cultural fabrics” surrounding her. Kent created hundreds of prints that served as sites of both transition and interaction amid a critical historical time period that was charged with social, political and religious significance.
The profound changes the Roman Catholic Church underwent in the 1960s and as a result of Vatican II have become significant factors in the lives of Kent and other Catholic women religious in the years since. When Pope John XXIII first announced his intention to call a church council in 1959, he stated his belief that the Roman Catholic Church needed aggiornamento, Italian for “updating.” Vatican II resulted in several decrees—including the “Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life” in 1965 (“Perfectae Caritatis”)—that encouraged Catholic religious orders to undergo “aggiornamento” in many aspects of their daily life.
New Unveilings
“Perfectae Caritatis” promoted experimentation in religious orders and invited Catholic religious brothers and sisters to reconsider their manner of living, including their clothing. In response, many Catholic sisters modified their use of a religious habit in their wardrobe, while others removed the habit completely and traded it in for regular street clothes. In the years following the council, Kent and many of her I.H.M. sisters took on a modified version of the habit; eventually, Kent removed the habit altogether.
As they became more visible to society in their physical appearance, Kent and other Catholic nuns also began playing a more visible and active role in meeting society’s greatest needs. The news media began referring to those sisters inspired by “Perfectae Caritatis” as the “New Nuns.” The New Nuns protested the Vietnam War, marched against racism in Selma and fought for human rights.
Soon Kent developed art to protest social injustices like poverty, war and racism. In addition to operating as sites of transition and interaction, Kent’s prints evolved into expressions of protest and political resilience. While she chose to veil the religious beneath the secular (and vice versa) in some cases, she fully unveiled her perspectives in others.
Art and Artist in Dialogue
While Kent used the serigraph as a site of political resilience, much of her art activism throughout the 1960s was neither overtly religious nor overtly secular. Her veiled apparatus and veiled surface operated at a symbolic level. In addition to challenging the traditional distinction between sacred and profane, Kent blurred boundaries between visible/invisible, religious/secular, traditional/modern, public/private, permitted/prohibited and past/future. To analyze Kent’s prints is to feel the tension between her past and her future and to witness her engagement with the tension found in the conventional binaries of sacred/profane, religious/secular and more.
In an eye-catching 1964 print titled “the juiciest tomato of all,” the dominating text on the print reads: “TOM ATO.” Two excerpts from the lengthy text that appears in the bottom half of the print—which Kent copied from a handwritten letter she received from an English professor, Samuel Eisenstein—read:
…If we are provided with a sign that declares Del Monte tomatoes are juiciest it is not desecration to add: “Mary Mother is the juiciest tomato of them all.” Perhaps this is what is meant when the slang term puts it, “She’s a peach,” or “What a tomato!”
We long for the heart that overflows for the all-accepting of the bounteous, of the real and not synthetic, for the armful of flowers that continues the breast, for the fingers that make a perfect blessing. There is no irreligiousness in joy, even if joy is pump-primed at first…
In an essay titled “Corita Kent and the Language of Pop,” the American art historian Susan Dackerman writes that “words have the power to make the heavenly present on earth, to bring God into being before us. Just as Kent invokes a God rehabilitated for ’60s culture, she materializes the Virgin as ‘the juiciest tomato’— an attractive, modern woman full of verve.” In bringing Christianity to modern audiences, Kent revealed innovative understandings of what the church was and what it could be. She provided, in Dackerman’s words, “a visualization of the divine suited to the contemporary world.”
Art and Renewal
Kent’s use of the silk screen enabled transformation, not only for herself, but as part of her understanding of her ministry in the world. Her art reflected her desire to transform the world. Considering how Kent’s work evolved during a time when she was thinking about the role of the veil—and her taking of the veil—in her own private life, her work also reflects the ways she negotiated her relationship to religion and her place in the church. In her 1967 work “with love to the everyday miracle,” viewers begin to see Kent negotiating how she identifies with religion. The small white text reads:
Conversion
is revolution
is growth
is living in a way
appropriate to
the coming of age
and is not understood
by the present age
which is passing away
God descends
man ascends
and they move on
Various large fonts, layered and obscured (some facing backward), read: “For you…WITH LOVE TO…the everyday miracle…that’s me! that’s my color!” The contrasting colors in “with love to the everyday miracle” are such that the small white text is more legible than the small text Kent uses in other works. The large bright green text, “WITH LOVE TO…the everyday miracle,” is also in clear view, although it is through its combination with the small white text and the obscured purple text that we may interpret the underlying message. “Conversion is revolution is growth…” reveals a transformation that Kent is experiencing. And as she etches the words “God descends, man ascends, and they move on,” Kent plays with religious concepts of incarnation and resurrection.
Ultimately, the large text indicates her relationship to a God that is present in the “everyday miracle.” Considered together, “with love to the everyday miracle” seems to uncover Kent’s movement away from the institutional church and toward a more personal relationship with God.
Engaged in a decades-long dialogue with her art, Kent eventually transformed into a new version of herself, not only as a religious person but also as an artist. The tendencies in her work emerged from her private life and involvement in a religious institution that was undergoing some but not always enough change. However, they also descended from the surrounding world. Analyses of her works reveal Kent’s negotiation of identity through serigraphy and her negotiation of her viewpoints both inside and outside of the institutions she inhabited. As Dackerman notes, “[although] she participated in two heady cultural undertakings—the reformation of religion and art—during the 1960s, she was an outlier in both movements, seemingly, and paradoxically, because of her association with the other.”
It was Kent’s position as an outlier in the Catholic Church that eventually caused her to grow weary. In 1968, she sought dispensation from her vows and moved to Boston, where she lived a new kind of sequestered life.
That same year, Kent began developing prints that directly challenged the institutional church. In “let the sun shine,” the dominant text reads: “LET THE SUN SHINE IN,” while the underlying quote from the progressive activist Rabbi Arthur Waskow reads: “the creative revolution—to take a chunk of the imagined future and put it into the present—to follow the law of the future and live it in the present.”
The main image in the print portrays Pope John XXIII. The timing of this piece suggests a reminiscence of the hope that Kent felt when that pope opened Vatican II in 1962. While some aggiornamento indeed occurred through the council, many Catholics—and in particular, Catholic women religious—hoped for more, especially as the council reassessed the church’s understanding of the role of women. Kent’s use of the quotation from Rabbi Waskow also suggests that the church has much to learn from other religious leaders spearheading “creative revolutions” of their own. Through “let the sun shine,” Kent declares that it is never too late for the church to “let the sun shine in.”
The veils—of Kent’s wardrobe and of the silk screen—ultimately served as intermediaries between Kent’s past, present and future selves. These veils also provided conditions of possibility for these selves to be in conversation with one another. Kent created art, and Kent’s art created her. She unveiled ideas of love and political resilience through art, and her art ultimately led back to her own unveiling.
This article appears in November 2025.
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