Although the nun and teacher Sister Mary Corita Kent was an internationally famous artist of the 1960s-80s whose work resides in major museums, the body of scholarship on her work is small, and has often relied on biographic and insular approaches. This dissertation puts forth an understanding of the art of Corita and her community at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles that frames the ethics of her political practice as informed and augmented by her Catholic vocation.

To these artists, art-making was as potentially generative for ethical work as was the content of their art. The production, financing, publicizing, and dissemination methods of IHC artwork were all motivated by a specifically progressive understanding of Catholicism that participated in protest movements and saw every part of the material world as a possibility for redemption. It was a vision of art that concretized a collaborative, radical, empowering theology.

Corita and IHC provide a unique opportunity to examine Christian activism in the contexts of 1960s protest and religious movements, providing convergences between Pop Art and politics, Catholicism and activism, art and ethics, and religion and modern art. Relying on unpublished primary sources, close formal analysis of Corita’s screenprints and other artworks (including Happenings and installations) and a historically informed understanding of the texture of the postwar American world, this dissertation will develop a fuller understanding of Corita and IHC’s work, in the process illuminating a particular case study of the complicated integration of progressive politics, orthodox Catholicism, and contemporary visual art.