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'Corita Kent's 1960s Pop' Exhibit Opens

15/06/2000

LAS VEGAS -- The University of Nevada, Las Vegas Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery unveils an exhibition of artwork entitled "The Big G Stands for Goodness: Corita Kent's 1960s Pop" July 13-August 19, 2000. Admission is free.

The exhibition was curated by Los Angeles-based writer Michael Duncan and was first presented at the Luckman Fine Arts Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles earlier this year.

An opening reception will be held 7- 9 p.m. July 13 immediately following Michael Duncan's gallery talk at 6:30 p.m..

"The Big G Stands for Goodness: Corita Kent's 1960s Pop" features 50 works that survey disarmingly engaging, formally inventive silk-screen prints from the 1960s by Sister Mary Corita (1918-1986). A teacher at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, she was a civil rights activist, anti-war activist, and feminist.

Corita (she resigned from her religious order in 1968) was one of the most popular American graphic artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Corita confirmed her upbeat theology in well-known advertising phraseology of her time in prints which include phases such as "The big G stands for goodness" (General Mills) and "Put a tiger in your tank (Esso gasoline). Logos and slogans promoting "Wonder" bread, "Humble" oil, "Sunkist" lemons, "Safeway" supermarkets, and even "Lark" cigarettes became visual and verbal puns endorsing her all-embracing humanitarianism.

Father Tom Gallenbach of St. Joseph, Husband of Mary Catholic Church in Las Vegas is very familiar with her work.

"I have two oil paintings of hers that were given to me by a former Immaculate Heart nun in the same convent with sister Corita. Sister Corita could take a simplistic thing like faith and portray a bird that starts singing before the dawn breaks...so simple...faith is like a bird...singing when it's still dark.

"I look at her paintings and it lifts up my spirits. A couple of years ago in Boston I was visiting a friend at Harvard and he took me to a water tower in Boston that was painted by Sister Corita. My friend pointed it out because she had signed it."

Sister Rina of St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, NV, is also excited about the exhibit. She comments, "Her work is extremely unique. So free and bold! She splashes color...at the same time you can't look at her work and not be challenged. She asks the right questions. In her time she was severely criticized by people in the church who did not ask the right questions. They felt she was too wild."

Jesuit poet Daniel Berrigan had predicted trouble for Sister Corita. He said at the time: "She introduces the intuitive, the unpredictable into religion, and thereby threatens the essentially masculine, terribly efficient, chancery-ridden, law-abiding, file-cabinet church."

Juxtaposed with these works will be works by 15 contemporary Los Angeles artists who use a similar approach to popular culture and formal experimentation with visual display of texts, including those by Mike Kelly, Allen Ruppersberg, Karen Carson, Robert Heinecken, Alexis Smith, Michael Gonzalez, Raymond Pettibon, Larry Johnson, Steve Hurd, Lari Pittman, and Ed Ruscha.

According to Duncan, the works by these contemporary Los Angeles artists "conjure and auspiciously compare with Corita's prints. Her playful uses of block letters, word fragments, mirrored writing and warped and morphed texts parallel those of Larry Johnson, Karen Carson, and Lari Pittman. Passages from texts by Gertude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Camus, ee commings, John Lennon, and Ugo Betti are often scrawled across Corita's work in a style that prefigures that of Raymond Pettibon. Moreover, Mike Kelly's felt banners from the late 1980s were directly spun off of her work, offering their own twisted celebration of the abject."

Recent exhibitions curated by Duncan include "Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart; A Compliment to Florine Stetheimer" at Holly Solomon Gallery in New York (1995) and "Pavel Tcheliltchew: Interior Landscapes" at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York (1998). Duncan is corresponding editor for Art in America Magazine.

Subsequent to its exhibition at the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, Corita's exhibit will travel to the University of Texas, San Antonio. This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Charles Mitchell, president, and Kathy Agajanian, regional sales manager, Frame Store; Peggy Kayser, Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community; Dean Hansell; Kourosh Larizadeh; George Wanlass; Tobey C. Moss; and Meryl Pollen.

This project has been funded in part by a grant from the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Gallery hours are 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. For further information, call 895-3893.

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