Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent (2026 reissue) | DelMonico Books
Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, a monograph first published by DelMonico Books in 2013 and now reissued, after a decade out of print, provides a look back at a Catholic school art teacher’s journey to become one of the most visible activist artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
Editors Ian Berry and Michael Duncan have organized the monograph into five sections, three of which lead us through Kent’s life and two that highlight how her radical visual innovations echoed into the work of artists for the decades that followed.
In the opening section of the book, Duncan outlines Kent’s early development as an artist. Kent was born Frances Elizabeth Kent, in 1918, and grew up in a family devoted to their Catholic faith. Following the footsteps of her two older siblings, she joined the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary straight out of high school. As a traveling teacher for the order, working first in California, then Canada, she started to develop a unique visual identity, inspired by artists like Ben Shahn and Charles Eames, who informed her work with their playfulness, color, subtlety, and the use of text in their compositions. Above all, she was interested in the way contemporary artists made their political stances part of their imagery. In 1947, she returned to Los Angeles to pursue her Masters in Art History and went on to teach art at Immaculate Heart College for the following two decades.
In 1962, the Church issued a decree that encouraged Catholic Orders to effect changes to become more relevant to their parishioners. Kent and her colleague Sister Maggie took the charge very seriously. The two teachers made it their mission to use art to break down barriers between the secular and religious worlds. They used quotes from literary and biblical figures to create graphic posters that were displayed during celebratory processions, marches, theater performances, and sometimes exhibited in community areas. Initially, their work remained mostly biblical, as demonstrated by Kent’s serigraph Fiat. The artwork, which depicts an abstracted image of the Madonna in bold, striking colors, was a response to angel Gabriel’s message that Mary would be the mother of God: Fiat mihi secundum tuum (Be it done unto me according to thy word).
Cynthia Burlingham, another contributor to the monograph, highlights how as Kent’s work progressed, she realized that this approach was only scratching the surface of Catholic faith, and that any subject matter could be religious. Kent later recalled how she began to expand her work with the students at the Immaculate Heart College using contemporary subjects, advertisements, and media:
So we all got together with a bunch of magazines and tore phrases. I suggested that everybody take two phrases from separate ads that were fun together. Like ”put a tiger in your tank” I really think of as saying [that] the spirit, whatever the spirit means to us, is inside of us, the God who is in us, or who is us, whatever, however you want to say it.
Kent sourced her materials from local markets, cutting out letters and patterns from packaging—a slogan from tomato soup, a word from a pasta box, a bright pink polka dot pattern from a detergent packet. Text was her main instrument, not just the meaning but the forms of letters themselves, which would physically bend or fold, literally transforming the text. Her intention was to infiltrate cultural consciousness by redirecting the visual language of advertising towards a message of social justice.
In the early 1960s, Kent started to get a large number of commissions, and her work gained traction as it was reproduced by news outlets and several magazines. She was commissioned to create the banner for the Vatican at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, nominated by the Los Angeles Times as one of the women of the year, and made her way to the cover of Newsweek Magazine.
One of the most prominent commissions Kent completed in the 1960s, discussed by Duncan in the first section of the book, was the IBM project. In 1965, she was approached by representatives at IBM to decorate the large windows of their Madison Avenue building in New York. With the help of several students, she created a tapestry of cardboard collage composed of slogans, photos, and serigraphs made with images from advertisements and mass media. The display was made up of 725 cardboard boxes and created a 135-foot-long installation titled “Peace on Earth” that used hard hitting quotations from activists and prominent social figures juxtaposed with images from war and consumerist America. Examples included the text “Have I done what is right?,” a quote assigned to Dag Hammarskjöld, the second UN Secretary-General, laid out next to photos of the massacred Viet Cong. After just one day in display, IBM covered the exhibit due to the number of complaints regarding its political nature. Two of Kent’s assistant students, Myers and McGowan, edited some of the material, and the exhibit reopened. To that Kent responded: “It just goes to show the power of words, though, doesn’t it? I didn’t think the messages were that strong, but apparently they are.”
Towards the end of the decade, Kent left the convent, in part because the Archbishop of Los Angeles openly disapproved of her more political art. Kent, who had come to feel that biblical stories and texts should aim to “open up ideas, rather than define and confine them,” continued to make art for the rest of her life.
Someday Is Now itself is an invitation for creativity and inspiration. At a time where art is being automated and dehumanized, the book’s message becomes all the more relevant. Kent’s career beckons artists to fall back in love with the process of making art a response to the human experience. The final three chapters of Someday Is Now mix images of her art to quotes and testimonies from artists whose work was informed by Kent’s, and the reader is encouraged to cut out the last page of the book and use it as a viewfinder, one of Kent’s favorite teaching techniques. The editors give Kent the last word:
Take your finder to the market, the theater, park, any gathering place where there is a lot to see. Look at the world through it for half an hour. The shapes you see there might become paintings you want to make.
