The U-M Museum of Art exhibit “Sister Corita: The Joyous Revolutionary,” through Aug. 15, celebrates the life and work of Sister Mary Corita: a Catholic nun, teacher and inspiration to luminaries including Buckminster Fuller.
A Catholic convent and college in Los Angeles might seem an unlikely breeding ground for pop art and social commentary. However, for nearly three decades, Corita devoted her life to creating cutting-edge serigraphs, or silkscreen prints.
In 1946, a decade after joining the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she began teaching art at Immaculate Heart College and by 1952 she had exhibited her first screen print. The exhibition is comprised of 44 prints that illustrate Sister Corita’s signature work beginning in the 1960s, which broke free from the more traditionally religious or Biblical imagery to works that encompassed a wider concept of spirituality.
Inspired by media and advertising, she began her evocative use, reuse and re-contextualization of everyday phrases and images to create art that addressed contemporary issues ranging from poverty, materiality and environmental degradation to inequality, social injustice and war.
The exhibit explores the artist’s work chronologically and thematically, from her early religious pieces and abstract expressionist-inspired works of the late 1950s to the popular “Love” stamp she created for the U.S. Postal Service.
This exhibition is a program of ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance and The National Endowment for the Arts. UMMA’s installation is made possible in part by the CEW Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund.
The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. It is closed Mondays and July 4.
