Corita Kent liked to quote the Balinese saying, “We have no art. We do everything as well as we can.” Kent made this the mantra of the art department of Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, where she taught for more than 20 years.

This idea permeates the most famous book about her, Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit, by Corita Kent and Jan Steward (Bantam Books, 1992). In one passage, the authors visit Sanganeer, India, where exquisite block-printing on fabric was mastered centuries ago. As they approach the workshop, they hear singing and drumming. But the percussive sounds were not the naggara, tabla, or dholak, but rather the rhythm of the wood blocks landing on the cloth, “…first with a sharp whack and then a softer thump on the side of the printer’s fist on the block.”

When asked, “Do you always sing when you print?” the printers said that they couldn’t answer the question because the two things are the same.

Sister Corita Kent was a Roman Catholic nun who entered the monastic Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at age 18, shed the habit at age 50, and made some of the most memorable, celebratory graphic art of the 1960s. In 1966, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek, and in 1967, her “Love”postage stamp, a joyous predecessor of the gay rights rainbow, was issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

To call her an icon would be correct, but not without irony: she was an iconoclast, or smasher of icons, first and foremost. It all began with a DIY silk-screen kit. Her resulting serigraphs are a blaze of electric color and written thoughts, often scribbled in her own distinctive handwriting.

At first glance, household textile giants of the 1960s and 1970s come to mind: Marimekko (notably 1964’s “Unikko” by Maija Isola), and Vera. Her work also suggests the Eames, Andy Warhol, Peter Max, and more recently Shepard Fairy and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

As a progressive advocate and activist for human rights, her work was deeply political. The Gospels were not absent from her messaging, although her playful treatment – depicting airplanes as guardian angels, and the Holy Eucharist as a loaf of Wonder Bread, accompanied by a rubber fish – riled conservative church culture.

She also ruffled feathers in the high-minded bastions of the art world with her irreverence. Kent gleefully repurposed elements from common product logos, commercial packaging and billboards, and warned against elevating the making of art into an elite sacrament for the entitled few.

Her teaching methods were also refreshingly unorthodox. A favorite practice was “looking sessions,” walking expeditions she made with her students to the car washes, bodegas and supermarkets around the college’s raggle-taggle Los Feliz neighborhood. She asked that each student make a “finder” by cutting a one-inch rectangle in the center of a piece of cardboard, and use it to “become a microscope.”

After leaving her Order and college, a move to Boston and a cancer diagnosis brought quieter, more reflective work. In 2019, the City of Los Angeles declared her birthday, November 20, Corita Kent Day.