You need to learn more about Corita Kent right now

“that they may have life”, serigraph, 1964. Transcribed text: ENRICHED BREAD It’s bad you don’t know what to do when you’ve got five children standing around crying for something to eat and you don’t know where to get it, and you don’t know which way to start to get it. I just get nervous or something. Kentucky miner’s wife There are so many hungry people that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread. Gandhi SOURCE: Corita.org

As a designer, I get inspired when I do deep dives into the works of other artists. As a former resident of Boston, Somerville MA, and Providence RI, I was familiar with Corita Kent’s work before I knew who she was.

Corita Kent is the artist behind the “Rainbow Swash”, also known in the 90s as the Ho Chi Minh gas tank (more about this later), is the largest piece of copyrighted artwork in the world. It is a large painted gas tank painted in rainbow colors that you can easily see from Interstate 93.

But she was much more than than a painter of an oil can mural. I have always been very interested in print design. Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita, was an artist, art teacher, and nun based out of Los Angeles and later Boston. Her prints, particularly from the 1960s and 1970s, are striking. She often gets grouped with other Pop artists of the same era, but her use of typography inspires me the most.

Like Andy Warhol, she was inspired by things like newspapers, food labels, and street signs. But often she would include quotes to go with her saturated color prints that mimicked food labels. Many of those quotes centered around her personal and spiritual mission to foster peace and social justice.