Idiosyncrasy has rarely looked as radiant—or as necessary—as it does in Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images, which opened on September 26th at the Marciano Art Foundation. In an art world that often privileges severity, Corita (1918–1986) insisted on joy, play, and faith as radical tools. A nun, a teacher, an activist, and a Pop artist who rivaled Warhol in her devotion to the everyday, Corita cultivated a practice that was equal parts prayer and protest, pedagogy and poetry.

The exhibition pulls from an astonishing archive: more than 15,000 35mm slides taken between 1955 and 1968, now distilled into a three-screen digital projection of over 1,100 images. These aren’t the polished emblems of history but the fragments she plucked from her surroundings—billboards screaming slogans, puppet shows, flowers in bloom, the carnival of Mary’s Day celebrations at Immaculate Heart College, where she taught. Her sorcery was in seeing differently, in recombining these pieces into a luminous and unruly whole.

If Pop Art often flirted with irony, Corita’s work throbbed with sincerity. Her silkscreens layered commercial typography with cries for justice, her color palettes rang with exuberance. The slides on view reveal how the camera was central to this vision: a tool for collecting, sorting, and remixing the overlooked. Her images are part scrapbook, part sermon, part rebellion—never flat, always alive.

The exhibition doesn’t stop at the images. In the Library, Irregularity: Corita and Immaculate Heart College’s Rule Breaking Designs revives the school’s art department newsletters and bulletins, vehicles for play, irreverence, and experiment. Edited by her mentor Sister Magdalen Mary and visually shaped by Corita, these publications depict how pedagogy itself could be a site of idiosyncratic art-making.

What makes Corita’s practice feel so contemporary is her refusal of binaries: faith and politics, art and life, sincerity and critique. She wasn’t afraid of mistakes—she called them sources. Her archive is an argument for abundance, for porousness, for believing that art could live anywhere and everywhere.

At a time when attention is fractured and images are endlessly disposable, Corita Kent’s slides ask us to slow down, to notice, to recombine the world in ways that feel personal, joyful, and subversively hopeful.

Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images runs September 26, 2025 – January 24, 2026 at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles.

‍