Sister Corita Kent

A teaching artist

Her methods and philosophy

Shawna Caldwell University of Florida

ARE6049: 1F30, Spring 2014

Sister Corita Kent

1918-1986

Teacher, guide, illuminator, activist, artist. As teacher and then head of the art department at Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood from the mid fifties through the sixties, Kent touched the lives of her students with her charismatic and fearless approach (Ault, 2006). No matter what class it was, her students said it was always a course in Corita. She taught them that life and art are not separate and to keep their eyes and minds open, always seeing, not just looking (Kent and Steward, 1992).

This was the motto of the art room at Immaculate Heart College. Based on a saying from Bali, it means that the noun art is a label, and you can’t live by labels. Sister Corita pushed her students to see the natural beauty and be aware of the pulse of life around them. Art is not separate from life and living. “To work, play, see, touch, laugh, cry, build, and use it all – even the painful parts, and survive with style: that’s what Corita taught” (Kent &Steward, 1992, p. 6).

“We can all talk, we can all write and if the blocks are removed, we can all draw and paint and make things. Drawing, painting, and making things are natural human activities, but in many they remain in the seed state, as potentials or wishes” (Kent and Steward, 1992, p.1).

Corita wanted to pass on some of her teachings that students found useful. Together with a friend and former student Jan Steward, they wrote the book Learning by heart: Teachings to free the creative spirit. While her focus was on art, students applied what they learned in her classes to all parts of their lives. As Steward wrote, “She taught us a way of working so true and basic that we could extract the essence of that process and apply it to the work before us whatever direction our lives took” (Kent and Steward, 1992, p. 10).

Some of the assignments and methods she used for teaching, including teaching students to learn to see, finding sources and building structures, are discussed in these pages.

Sister Corita’s

Teachings to

Free the

Creative Spirit

LEARNING TO SEE Sister Corita used many methods to help students see the world around them as if

for the first time. She taught that there was slow looking and fast looking. Slow looking might involve tools, such as a magnifying glass, viewfinder or camera lens

and best performed alone. Fast looking builds energy. This kind of looking is performed in crowded places or looking out the window of a moving train. These

images are stored in your memory for later. (Kent and Steward, 1992).

PRETEND YOU ARE A MICROSCOPE This is an exercise in losing content and context. Without looking at the pictures, tear the pages from a magazine and cut into 2” by 3” rectangles. You should have about a hundred. Then, based on form and composition, sort these into two piles. The piles will be images that you like, and images you like less.

CONTOUR DRAWING Make a contour drawing of a shoe or a chair. Your eyes and hand have to move at exactly the same pace. One cannot go faster than the other. Look at every detail and allow the pencil to record all that the eyes see.

• Start at the top and go down.

• Start at the bottom and go up.

• Start at one corner and go to the opposite

“A contour drawing is like climbing a mountain rather than flying over it in an airplane” – Kimon Nicolaides (Kent and Steward, 1992, p. 22).

DEVELOPING OUR SEEING MUSCLES Like weight lifters that exercise their muscles, artists must also develop their seeing muscles by constant, disciplined use. For ten minutes a day, study a plant. Write about it for fifteen minutes a day, how it feels, smells, looks, sounds when wind blows through it. Then do ten drawings every day of the leaves, and ten drawings every day of the whole plant.

“Looking is the beginning of seeing. They are not the same. Seeing is when connections are made, and the truth is revealed.“ -Corita Kent (Kent and

Steward, 1992, p. 33).

THE SENSE DIARY A most valuable source of information that you create to fit your senses. It’s a tool that allows you to become aware of and retain details that might be forgotten.

Any notebook or journal may be used as long as the paper is strong enough for drawing and painting, and durable enough for constant use. Here are some ideas to include in your sense diary.

• Favorite poems or sayings.

• Words that have meaning to you

• List of books you’ve read or books you want to read.

• Descriptions of things you’ve heard, read, or experienced.

• Words that have a ring to them or sound interesting when you way them.

VIEWFINDERS You can make your own viewfinder by cutting a rectangle in a thick piece of paper or cardboard. Take your viewfinder to the park, store, or anyplace where there is a lot to see. Observe the world around you for a half hour and see what compositions you might make. Something might turn into a painting.

“The function of a work of art has always been to alert people to things they might have missed” (Glascock, 2013).

SOURCE “Working from a source is not the same thing as copying” (Kent and Steward, 1992, p.47). Your goal is not to duplicate the source, but to use it as a starting

point. Using a source frees you to depart from somewhere rather than nowhere or everywhere. Sometimes finding a subject can be the most difficult part of an artwork. Corita provided some exercises that she used in her classroom (Kent

and Steward, 1992).

THINGS CHANGE Don’t think of your source as being static or unchanging. Look to the changes as your source. Some things change quickly, such as an ice cube, while others take days, like a dandelion.

• Look at a dandelion as it first emerges. Make a drawing.

• Every few days, look at the dandelion and record the changes.

• Make drawings at each viewing.

BRAINSTORMING Make a list of 100 things related to a celebration. Don’t censor; accept everything! Think about the senses. How does it smell? Sound? Is there special music? What colors are there?

WORDS AS SOURCES Create a list of twenty-five short quotes from literature, then create a list of twenty-five short quotes from other sources. Compare the two lists, then take you five favorite quotations from each list and pair them with pictures of five mountains.

Keep both lists of quotes in your sense journal to be used in the future.

“We are each other’s sources” (Corita and Steward, 1992, p. 43).

“It is the transformation of mundane events into other realities that our works come into being” (Kent and Steward,

1992, p. 62).

STRUCTURE “In my projects and assignments I work very hard on structures within

which students can work – structures that will be supporting enough – a

kind of scaffolding. The structure should stand high enough to paint

those parts of the building they want to paint and it should not restrict

how they should paint it. And when they finish, the structure should be

dismantled and put away…perhaps to be reused in another form at

another time.” – Corita Kent (Kent and Steward, 1992, p. 71).

Structures are simply assignments. Sister Corita would set the students up for success by methodically assigning each little step along the way so that the students did not have a chance to become uninvolved. They were anxious for the next step because they felt very secure about the background that they already had (Glascock, 2013).

WORDS FROM A FORMER STUDENT

“Usually her assignments are very large. She’ll say do 50 to 100 things depending on what it is. You start making those hundred things and the first twenty you make are based upon ideas that you had and then suddenly you have to go somewhere else and start struggling around some non-idea area and that struggle is the best because if you stop at forty you would do twenty things that you thought of and twenty things that you weren’t sure of and then you would go nowhere after that. But then you do twenty-five more that grow out of the conflict of knowing what to do and not knowing what to do and those are usually the best things” (Glascock, 2013).

Sister Corita Kent,

the artist “What was going on in her mind, what she was concerned about had to be in her art. There was no separating…’This is my political thought and this is my artistic expression.’ It was one

and the same thing.” – Sasha Carrera from Corita Art Canter (Gobsen, 2012).

“What she taught is what she did is what she was thinking is what she was surrounded by” (Gobsen, 2012).

This project was created for an history of art education class for University of Florida’s Master of Art Education program by student Shawna Caldwell. With the exception of the pictures of Sister Corita and her serigraphs, the artwork is original. References: Ault, J. (2006). Come alive! The spirited art of Sister Corita. London, UK: Four Corners Books. Kent, C. & Steward, J. (1992). Learning by heart: Teachings to free the creative spirit. New York, NY: Bantam Books. Glascock, B. (Producer and director). (January 27, 2013). We have no art. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15YDYbNk570. Gobsen, D. L. (Editor). Center for the Study of Political Graphics. (2012). Decade of dissent: Democracy in action 1965-1975. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuU7jc7zScA&index=9&list=PL70C2D0E57C05B32E.