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Courtesy Corita Art Center, Los Angeles, corita.org
Corita Kent was a nun, artist, educator and social activist, who influenced a generation of other artists. The exhibit “Live the Moment Light” at the Palo Alto Art Center takes its name and sentiment from one of Kent’s late screen prints. Three contemporary Bay Area artists, Terri Friedman, Soleé Darrell and Angelica Trimble-Yanu, respond to Kent’s artwork directly or indirectly through color, materials, and contemplation, and unexpected themes emerge.
One of the main themes in the exhibit is the notion that life consists of both light and dark moments. Christine Koppes, the guest curator, explained that Kent’s later art reflects “how in life you need to hold both the dark and the light, you need to still have this optimism, but it comes along with the realities of the world.”
Covering art from the 1960s to today, “Live the Moment Light” invites viewers to explore these themes through observation, discovery, and reflection — ways of being in the world that Kent encouraged and lived by herself.
Corita Kent
Kent was born in 1918. At the age of 18, Frances Elizabeth Kent entered the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, taking the religious name Sister Mary Corita. Kent began teaching at Immaculate Heart College in the 1940s and eventually became head of its art department with a master’s degree in art history.
In the 1950s, she began experimenting with screen printing, also known as serigraphy. Her early prints featured religious imagery but later, inspired by pop art, she started incorporating advertising images and slogans, popular song lyrics, biblical verses, and literature.
During the 1960s, her work became increasingly political, urging viewers to consider poverty, racism and social injustice. This created tensions with conservative Church authorities and in 1968, she left the order and moved to Boston.
After her move, Kent’s art evolved into a sparser, introspective style, influenced by living in a new environment, a secular life, and her battles with ovarian cancer. At the time of her death in 1986, she had created almost 800 serigraph editions, thousands of watercolors and innumerable public and private commissions, including a United States Love postage stamp.
The main part of the exhibit includes 11 of Kent’s late prints from her 1977 “Moments” series. They are all colorful abstractions (in yellow, red, blue, green, and purple), with brown branchlike lines that appear to connect across the prints, with a few flowers and leaves included. There is also text on each print, for example, “Live the Moment Light,” “Live the Dark Moment” and “Your Each Moment Is Vital Because It Affects the Whole.”
Koppes also included three of Kent’s prints from the 1960s, which she described as “more abstract and a little bit darker,” with “horizontal compositions” that relate well to the other artists’ artwork. She further included some catalogues and books about Kent at the beginning of the exhibit “where people can familiarize themselves with her work because it’s so much more than what’s in the show and she’s so incredible.”
In this section of the exhibit, visitors can view a 20-minute documentary called “Become a Microscope: 90 Statements on Sister Corita,” developed for her 90th birthday. We learn about Kent’s life and influence on others with testaments such as, “she got us in touch with our inner artists,” “her spirituality came through in her art,” and “she was an A+ person on every front.”
A final piece of information included about Kent in the lobby is her 10 art making rules from the Immaculate Heart College Art Department. For example, Rule 6 states that, “Nothing is a mistake, there’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.” Koppes noted that the rules were displayed as “an inspiration for people,” who come to the center to view and make art.
Terri Friedman
Terri Friedman is one of the three contemporary artists who is most directly inspired by Corita Kent’s work. She said that she is inspired by artists “who use abstraction, color, words, and she (Kent) is definitely one of the dominant ones.”
Friedman is represented in the exhibit with five large weavings and a mixed-media video installation. She used to make paintings and sculptures, but about 12 years ago she began making large weavings. She noted that she always wanted to weave since she grew up around textiles and fabrics, as her mother was an interior designer. But it was a large tapestry by Spanish painter Joan Miró that she saw in Barcelona that gave her the spark to begin weaving. “It was like, ‘oh, I’ve got to do this!’”
This experimentation in both Friedman and Kent’s art, as well as a painterly eye, (meaning that artists make other media look like paintings), were some of the similarities that Koppes noticed in the two artists’ work. Koppes explained about Friedman’s weavings: “They’re weavings, they’re textiles, but they have a painterly aspect to them.”
Another similarity between Kent and Friedman is that they both have taught art; Friedman has been a teacher at California College of the Arts for the past 25 years. Further, like Kent, she has also had a cancer diagnosis, which has made her art more personal. In fact, one of her weavings, 2025’s “Wake Up,” relates to this experience in her life.
The weaving references both a personal and a national wake-up call, “I woke up from a diagnosis, but it felt like we were getting a national diagnosis with the presidency, with him getting reelected,” Friedman said.
Koppes commented on this aspect of Kent and Friedman’s art. “You are going through these hard things, but still feeling this call to use your work to send a message, to inspire people.”
“Wake Up” is a large, colorful, abstract weaving, but similar to Kent’s “Memory” series, it still has recognizable imagery, such as a star, a spiral, an apple, an instrument, an arrow, and yellow smoke. At the bottom of the weaving, it says “WAKE UP,” written in capital letters.
Friedman’s video installation was made for the exhibit in collaboration with her son, Isaac Monheit, who is a technology artist. The installation is located in the glass gallery of the art center and is called “Leave Some for Tomorrow Chapel.” It is an homage to Kent and makes connections between Kent’s art and life and Friedman’s life.
Kent made art related to grocery items, such as Wonder bread and Campbell’s soup, which Friedman referred to as, “the ordinary as extraordinary.” This was Friedman’s inspiration to create an installation that references a grocery store, which also pays homage to her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather who owned grocery stores in Colorado.
On the back wall hangs one diamond-shaped and four vertical weavings in neutral colors with her son’s video projected onto the weavings. Friedman described it as a “psychedelic” video, with changing colors and patterns, a scene from a grocery store aisle, and grocery items falling down from the sky. Overall, apart from being an homage to Kent, the “Leave Some for Tomorrow Chapel” also speaks to the importance of leaving something for the future, leaving something for the next generation, giving more than we take and not overconsuming. So again, Friedman’s art operates both at a personal level and at a more global level.
Soleé Darrell
Soleé Darrell is a multidisciplinary artist born in Bermuda. She noted in an email interview that she found Kent’s way of using color and layering extraordinary and rare. “Corita has taught me to always be brave, thoughtful, compassionate and playful in my practice.”
Koppes also pointed out that Darrell’s work is very intuitive and spiritual, “so that aspect of Corita being so tied to the church, her work is very spiritual, as well, but they’re (spiritual) in different ways.”
Another connection in the exhibit is between Friedman and Darrell, who both work with textiles. But where Friedman uses yarn and fibers for her weavings, Darrell uses dyes on silk velvet. Koppes noted that “there’s not many artists working in velvet; it’s very unique.”
Darrell is represented in the exhibit with five dyes on silk velvet, and similar to Friedman, she also created a special piece for the exhibit, an art installation called “Peace Portal.” It is a large installation of dyed silk velvet in orange and green colors draped on a light blue background.
Darrell noted that “her (Kent’s] ideas for bringing people together to amplify her messages of peace through creativity were ahead of her time.” Darrell has created multiple site-specific portals in other places and she explained that, “I always want to use the portals as an opportunity for people to have a moment of peace in a chaotic world.”
Darrell’s largest silk velvet piece is called “Men Carried to Their Destiny by Stars.” It is titled after a poem she found in a book at a Mexico City flea market. “I loved this phrase so much because it makes me think about fate and if a person’s destiny is predetermined by the universe,” she said.
It is an abstract painting, layered in red and dark purple colors. Koppes described it as “a night sky,” “a NASA photo of a galaxy,” or “a movement across space.”
Angelica Trimble-Yanu
Angelica Trimble-Yanu is a mixed visual artist and sculptor. She is an enrolled member of the Oglála Lakȟóta Sioux Nation from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, with roots in the San Francisco Bay Area. Five prints and five photographs of hers are included in the exhibit.
In an email interview, she described how Kent’s art has influenced her: “Corita Kent has been an important influence on me because of the way she brought together spirituality, language, and color. … Her work demonstrates that art can hold joy and conviction at the same time.”
Koppes also made the connection between Kent and Trimble-Yanu that, “in everything she (Trimble-Yanu) does she needs to have this bigger goal and message.” Further, both artists are print makers but in very different ways.
Where Kent created screen prints, Trimble-Yanu creates monotype prints, which only produce a single, unique impression. Trimble-Yanu explained that, “monotype is particularly important to my practice because of its relationship to movement, transfer, and impermanence.”
Two of her prints, “Black Sun” and “Iktomi,” are black-and-white monochrome prints on wood panel and traditional Lakȟóta deerskin, respectively. Trimble-Yanu pointed out that “the title (Black Sun) creates a tension between darkness and illumination,” whereas “’Iktomi’ draws from the Lakȟóta figure Iktomi, a complex trickster figure associated with transformation, contradiction, teaching, and consequence.”
Similar to Kent, Trimble-Yanu also creates series of prints. In this exhibit, she has a series of prints called “The Sun Bathed Everything I-III.” These are three monotype prints that look like cutout tree rings with yellow splashes on top. Koppes shared that, “I just love that this yellow is something that ties her to Corita’s ‘Live the Moment Light’ (print).”
Trimble-Yanu said that, “the three pieces are about being surrounded by light and recognizing that the landscape is never static. There is illumination, but there is also impermanence.”
Overall, Koppes hopes that viewers take away from the exhibit one of Kent’s life lessons: “Corita always had this lesson of looking at things closely and slowly, and that’s something I also would like out of the exhibition: for people to slow down and really look at these works and have a response to it.”
‘Live the Moment Light’ is on view through Dec. 13 at the Palo Alto Art Center, 1313 Newell Road, Palo Alto; paloalto.gov.
