photograph by derrick.garrett@rocketmail.comDuring the nineteen-sixties, I used to hang out with a couple of friends who happened to travel in the circles of the then renowned Boston Catholic artist, Sister Mary Corita.* Back then, when I encountered Corita’s works for the first time, some of them were displayed on occasion in my own church, I was blown away, as we used to say in those days.
I imagine that many Boston area residents and visitors, too, have had similar experiences over the years, as they’ve encountered Corita’s creativity, although probably unawares. To this day, hundreds of Boston commuters drive by several large gas tanks every work day, as those drivers make their way along the city’s Southeast Expressway. Probably many of those drivers have no idea that those tanks, splashed with bright colors, are the work of Corita.** Hundreds of airline passengers, gliding into or out of Boston’s Logan Airport, also contemplate those bright tanks below them. I wager that very few of those passengers ever have heard of her.
Too bad. I think Americans today, especially American Christians, still have much to learn from Corita’s creativity, as long as we position ourselves not just to see the shapes and colors of her works, but also to see through them, in order to grasp the inner – and the dark! – vibrancy of their ostensibly bright testimony. To that end, I think it’s instructive to contemplate just one of her works, which happens to have been totally executed – in black!
Corita once did a centerfold for Commonweal, in memory of the artist, Ben Shahn. For that work, she inscribed these words from a Hasidic story: “he repeated the letters of the alphabet over and over beseeching the Almighty to arrange them into the appropriate words for the prayer.”
I believe that in order to truly be grasped by Corita’s works of color, as distinct from other bright, but superficial works of art from the nineteen-sixties, you have to encounter her vision as if you were suspended over forty thousand fathoms of ocean depths – to invoke an expression from Soren Kierkegaard. I have often thought of Corita’s works as – precariously thin. If you contemplate them aright – this has been my experience – you will be drawn through their luminescent surfaces into the dark dimensions of Nothingness, out of which, according to classical Christian testimony, the world was created: creatio ex nihilo.
My take-away? Notwithstanding the sometimes reassuring bright colors of our mundane experience, everything we know could easily disintegrate – “things fall apart, the centre will not hold” – and disappear in an instant. Corita’s bright vision, I believe, in addition to everything else, tells us that dark truth. The precarity of our finitude! By ourselves, the best we sometimes have is shapeless, albeit sometimes bright, swaths of color. And that can be beautiful! Still, you and I are at once suspended over 40,000 fathoms. Paul Tillich called this: experiencing the threat of Non-Being.
Don’t be titillated, then, by the sometimes bright colors of this world. In existential fact, they’re ephemeral. Instead, and in truth, as proclaimed by the witness of countless faithful artists of ambiguity such as Corita: contemplate the darkness that you can see through the bright colors, if you have eyes to see, and then see those bright colors all over again, as if for the first time.
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*Mary Corita Kent, 1918-1986.
** From Wikipedia: Tensions between the order and church leadership were mounting, with the Los Angeles archdiocese criticizing the college as “liberal” and Cardinal James McIntyre labeling the college as “communist” and Kent’s work as “blasphemous.” Due to this, Kent returned to secular life in 1968 as Corita Kent.