Learning By Heart (Allworth Press)
Witness to Integrity (Liturgical Press)
A Place at the Table (Elevated Lab)
Come Alive! (Four Corners)
Join us for a fascinating panel discussion about artist, educator, and "rebel nun" Sister Corita! Hear from Corita’s students and former sisters who defied the Cardinal, renounced their vows, and redefined themselves as an independent ecumenical community – dedicated to those radical ideals of peace and justice! This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the independent Immaculate Heart community.
This event is presented in conjunction with Artwalk, which will features Sister Corita's work on display at the Hollywood Lutheran Church (1733 N. New Hampshire Ave.) and other venues throughout Los Feliz. Four books related to the Sister Corita and the Immaculate Heart community will be available for purchase.
Liz Mahoney, IHM, has been a member of the Immaculate Heart Community for 65 years and was present at the chapter that made the decision to update the Community following Vatican II.
Helen Kelley, IHM, is the former president of Immaculate Heart College and former president of Immaculate Heart Community.
Lenore N. Dowling, IHM, is a former faculty member of the IHC Art Department and current chair of the Immaculate Heart Community Board.
Nan Cano is an Immaculate Heart College alumna, former teacher at Immaculate Heart High School, and author of Acts of Light: Martha Graham in the 21st Century.
Jan Steward, a distinguished graphic designer and photographer, lives in Los Angeles. She is the co-author of Learning By Heart.
Richard Crawford was a friend and student of Sister Corita's. He's only interested in painting, movies, gardening, politics, and Plant Spirit Medicine. Read that book.
Corita chose David Mekelburg to teach all of her classes at
Immaculate
Heart when she moved to Boston. Donald Jackson, scribe to England's
Royal
Family, said, "Mekelburg it the finest calligrapher in the States."
Aaron Rose will moderate tonight's panel. Aaron is a film director, curator and writer currently living in Los Angeles. He was co-curator of the Beautiful Losers touring exhibition (2003-2009), edited the collected book, and is also the director of the documentary film of the same title (2008). In 2009, he completed the short film Become A Microscope based on the life and art of Sister Corita. His publishing imprint, Alleged Press releases hardcover books by contemporary artists. He is also co-editor (along with Ed Templeton and Brendan Fowler) of ANP Quarterly magazine.
In the tradition of Wild Mind, a guide to unleashing the artist
in us all, by an icon in the women's creativity movement. Kent's work appeared
in ads for IBM, on a U.S. stamp, on embassy walls, and in national museums
worldwide, but it was as a master teacher that her work had the most influence.
Now her teachings are gathered in this remarkable volume. Photos and drawings
throughout.
Witness to Integrity is a first-person account of the historic dispute between the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters (I.H.M.) and James Francis Melntyre, the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles. Former Mother General of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters and president of the Immaculate Heart Community. Anita Caspary, I.H.M., tells her story of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters' motivations and struggles in their claim for authority and freedom to live a Christian life in accordance with their consciences. The conflicts that lead a part of the Immaculate Heart Sisters' Community to become an ecumenical community are described with vividness.
At 18, Corita Kent (1918-1986) entered the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, where she taught art and eventually ran the art department. After more than 30 years, at the end of the 1960s, she left the order to devote herself to making her own work. Over a thirty-five-year career she made watercolors, posters, books and banners--and most of all, serigraphs--in an accessible and dynamic style that appropriated techniques from advertising, consumerism and graffiti. The earliest of it, which she began showing in 1951, borrowed phrases and depicted images from the Bible; by the 1960s, she was using song lyrics and publicity slogans as raw material. Eschewing convention, she produced cheap, readily available multiples, including a postage stamp. Her work was popular but largely neglected by the art establishment--though it was always embraced by such design luminaries as Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass. More recently, she has been increasingly recognized as one of the most innovative and unusual Pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionizing graphic design and making some of the most striking--and joyful--American art of her era, all while living and practicing as a Catholic nun. This first study of her work, organized by Julie Ault on the twentieth anniversary of Kent's death, with essays by Ault and Daniel Berrigan, is the first to examine this important American outsider artist's life and career, and contains more than 90 illustrations, many of which are reproduced for the first time, in vibrant, and occasionally Day-Glo, color.