NO NUKES: The 1985 piece Come Up |
Great political artists need great political events, and as the ’60s went on, Kent rose to the occasion. As the news got darker — Vietnam War, assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. — her colors grew hotter and her content became darker, more mournful. She reached her peak with searing images made right after she left the convent.Love Your Brother (1969) is a memorial to King’s 1968 murder. She writes “The King is Dead/Love Your Brother” across stacked news photos in glowing green and violet showing King in the back of a police car after being arrested in Birmingham and King hugging his wife after winning Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Such designs seem simple, but with well-chosen colors and a few words, Kent channeled the devastating loss and yet inspired with a call to carry on King’s work.
Around 1971, her work mellowed. DayGlo colors were out; rainbows and earth tones were in. But she continued to make political work. People assumed she hid the profile of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh in the Boston gas tank stripes. (Kent maintained that people were imagining things — but didn’t mind that that’s what they saw.) She produced anti-nuke broadsides and critiques of our government’s actions in El Salvador, but her imagery became saccharine. Her anti-nuke piece Come Up (1985) is a doodle of flowers with the handwritten words “So far the crocuses have always come up” floating in the sky.
Ault chalks her departure from the convent to exhaustion from ideological battles with church honchos, a packed schedule of teaching and lecturing, and trying political times. After that fiery burst of work immediately afterward in 1969, Kent seems to have burned out and craved calm.
“Corita Kent: We Can Create Life Without War” |Breslin Fine Arts, 187 Main St, East Greenwich | Through
May 15
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Museum And Gallery
, Culture and Lifestyle, Hobbies and Pastimes, Robert F. Kennedy, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Hobbies and Pastimes, Robert F. Kennedy, Social Issues, History, War and Conflict, Martin Luther King Jr., Visual Arts, Gardening, Flowers, Less
