Sister Corita
Philadelphia: United Church Press / Pilgrim Press, 1968. In black cloth boards. 80 pp. 10 1⁄4 x 14 1⁄4 in. With 34 unbound posters, as issued. Housed in 10 3⁄4 x 14 3⁄4 in. illustrated box. First Edition. Essays by Harvey Cox [and] Samuel A. Eisenstein. Very good. Some wear to box and light foxing to several pages of book and a few posters; without original sticker at edge of box. Item #6579
The rare artist’s book from Sister Corita, an activist, educator, nun, and prolific artist who produced serigraphs in Pop Art style, meant to reach a mass audience.
Corita believed that all people should have affordable access to art. She’s been said to involve herself in the world in a labor of celebration. While seemingly a conservative figure in times of mass upheaval, change, and disorder, in the 1960s she began working with more directly political themes and content in her own colorful and redemptive style.
In 1963, she was commissioned to create a banner for the Vatican Pavilion in the World’s Fair of 1964 in New York; that poster is reproduced in this box set. Five years later, in 1968, Sister Corita left her religious home at the Immaculate Heart
of Mary, after encountering opposition to her work and person from Cardinal James McIntyre. Throughout her life, her printing practice was interwoven with her activism and pedagogy; Corita channeled and championed the spirit in affirmation, like forebears Walt Whitman and John Dewey.
The posters in this set are a stunning collection of her life’s work, with facsimile reproductions of her renowned printings, introduced by Corita herself, Harvey Cox, and Samuel A. Eisenstein.
“There is no science of the particular. This uncertainty is the dirty, grubby, hard bone of the artist’s life — this doing it new every time. There can be no rules about leaping into the new.”.
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