Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images focuses on a little seen part of Corita’s artistic practice: her archive of over fifteen thousand 35 mm slides that she and her cohorts took between 1955 and 1968 while she was a beloved teacher in the art department at Immaculate Heart College. Collecting fragments of the world with her camera for reuse at a later date, her eye documented the contemporary Los Angeles urban landscape of advertising and billboards, social events such as the effervescent and carnivalesque processions of the college’ s Mary’s Day celebrations, dolls and puppets, flowers, and many other often-overlooked moments of everyday wonder. This exhibition brings together over 1,100 images from Corita’s photographic archive in an effort to show how photography was an integral part of her artistic practice as both a source and an inspiration. Presented as a three-screen digital slide projection that pays homage to Corita’s multi-screen slide show lectures, Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images offers a unique look at this photographic archive, combining and recombining images in an exploration of her joyful and idiosyncratic way of seeing the world.
Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images is organized by MAF Director Hanneke Skerath and independent writer and curator Douglas Fogle for Marciano Art Foundation in collaboration with Corita Art Center.