Why Corita Kent's work matters so much right now

Dear DnA readers,

I hope you’re doing as well as possible in these trying times.

I recently ran into a friend who just lost his federal government subcontracting job to the DOGE blitzkrieg. In a flash, this person's life of dedication to public service is gone because of Elon Musk's crazed rampage.

Have you noticed, by the way, how pretty much every news article about Musk qualifies him as, "the world's richest man?" Why do they do that? We already know he is super-rich and thereby extremely powerful. It's crass and obsequious, and makes one yearn for its opposite — such as a humble, creative commitment to human dignity, personified in the late Corita Kent, whose new Art Center opens this weekend!

5. Corita Kent, 1965, Corita Art Center-1 Sister Mary Corita pictured with her artworks at Immaculate Heart College, 1965. Corita Art Center, LA.

In 1936, Frances Elizabeth Kent joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, a progressive order of nuns, at age 18, taking the name Sister Mary Corita. She studied art at Immaculate Heart College, and at USC, then later ran IHC's art department, while creating a fount of artworks that expressed spirituality and activism around poverty, racism, and social injustice.

She worked in many media but is best known for her numerous silkscreen prints, which are part Pop, part Matisse, with imagery drawn from religion, commerce, and pop culture, and always composed with an innate sense of balance (evident in an astonishing drawing from her high school years on the wall at the new center). She was close with the leading modern designers of her time, including Charles and Ray Eames and Buckminster Fuller. In 1968, she left the order, becoming Corita Kent, and remained active in social causes until her death of cancer in 1986.

08. Corita Kent, e eye love, 1968_ 68-35 Corita Kent, e eye love, from the circus alphabet series, 1968, serigraph, courtesy of Corita Art Center, LA, corita.org

For years, the bulk of her collection has been held at the Corita Art Center at Immaculate Heart Community (IHC) (a secular community of women that evolved from the religious order, in Echo Park). Now it has spun off as an independent nonprofit, built on seed funding from IHC, and located in the downtown Arts District, in a third-floor space in a building on Traction Avenue. It will steward the collection of 30,000 artworks and host exhibitions and workshops for schools and nonprofits.

It's still a little off the beaten track. You have to book to visit, and then get buzzed in. But there on the ground floor, you see Corita's Ten Rules writ large. Then, on ascending to the third floor you are greeted by vivid red and blue-white murals framing the door (wayfinding is by Keith & Co, with murals hand-painted by LA Trade Tech College students). Enter the center and Kent's works are on display throughout, including in the storeroom, which happened to be filled on the day I visited with the snacks in pop packaging echoing the Corita poster on the wall (image top of page).

01. Corita Kent, chavez, 1969_69-80__PH(1) Corita Kent, chavez. from the heroes & sheroes series, 1968-1969, serigraph, courtesy of Corita Art Center, LA, corita.org

Corita Art Center opens on Saturday, March 8th, with an inaugural exhibition of images from the "heroes and sheroes" series made by Corita in 1968 and 1969, paying homage to people she admired, including Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, John F. Kennedy, and Cesar Chavez.

All her work is gorgeous, but, as pointed out by the center's Executive Director, Nellie Scott, and Board Chair Sheharazad Fleming, it was "never just about the esthetics. It was about being a springboard for dialogue. It is such a reflection of our shared humanity, which is why it still resonates right now."

CAC is at 811 Traction Avenue, Suite 3A, Los Angeles, 90013. Open by appointment on Fridays, 11:00 AM–5:00 PM (nonprofits, school groups); Saturdays, 11:00 AM–5:00 PM (general public).

Click here for the center and here to reserve, and read on for more Design Things To Do.

Design Things To Do

ADUs: Small Size, Big Impact
Resource Furniture, 314 North Crescent Heights Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048
Thursday, March 6th, 5:30–8:30 PM; Panel: 6:15 PM

Since being legalized some eight years ago, ADUs have had an impact far outstripping their petite size — delivering extra space and income for homeowners, opportunities for intergenerational living, and, since the fires, providing housing for some evacuees. They've also unleashed creative residential design, making the most of limited square footage.

If you are interested in building an ADU or simply learning more about them, join me at Resource Furniture this Thursday for a reception and conversation with seasoned ADU designers Steve Pallrand (Home Front Build), Erla Dögg Ingjaldsdóttir and Tryggvi Thorsteinsson (Minarc), and realtor Izumi Tanaka (Home Green Homes podcast).

This event coincides with the two-day Design West Hollywood. If you are in the neighborhood for that program of events, add the ADU dialogue to your schedule.

Click here to RSVP.

8770-MasterXX cropped Oasis ADU, designed by Minarc, Image courtesy Minarc/Art Gray

Desert X
March 8th–May 11th, 2025
Self-guided tour, multiple locations, Coachella Valley

Desert X, the site-specific, art exhibition in the Coachella Valley, opens this Saturday. Curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield with Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, eleven artists from Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East will "reflect on the desert’s deep time evolutions, revealing a profound reverence for the enduring spirit of this harsh yet resilient region."

“The land of Desert X is no longer the mythical and endless expanses of the American West but has come to include the effects of our ever-growing human presence,” said Wakefield in a press release. That human presence of course includes the visitors and artists participating in Desert X, including the artist and philosopher Agnes Denes whose "Living Pyramid," sprouting native plants, is staged at Sunnylands Center & Gardens.

Wakefield continues, “Artists continue to be inspired by the idea of unadulterated nature but in its search, they have also come to recognize that this is an idea and that the realities of the world we live in now are both more complex and contested. Time, light, and space permeate every aspect of this work but so too does an urgency to find new sustainable approaches to living in an increasingly imperiled world.”

Click here for details.

Agnes Denes. Titled The Living Pyramid The Living Pyramid, by Agnes Denes. Image courtesy Desert X.

Nowruz Family Festival
UCLA's Dickson Court and Royce Hall
Sunday, March 9th, 12:00–5:00 PM; Nowruz Concert at Royce Hall: 6:00 PM

Every year, the Farhang Foundation welcomes spring with a large Nowruz (Iranian New Year) party at UCLA. The 15th takes place this Sunday, with an as-always colorful daylong program with free fun for all ages — including traditional music, arts and crafts, dance, delicious Persian food, entertainers, and the signature Grand Haft Sîn display, in which the spring blooms are the joyful medium.

Click here for details.

Grand Haft Sin, the centerpiece of Nowruz festivities Image courtesy Farhang.org.

Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture
Talk by author Todd Gannon
March 13th, 5:30 PM
Perloff Hall Decafe, 1317 Perloff Hall, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, UCLA

Before his untimely death in 1996 at age 50 from complications relating to AIDS, Franklin D. Israel was, as his mentor Frank Gehry said at the time, "on his way" to becoming a great architect.

Now the designer of innovative residential projects and office interiors — characterized by an eclectic range of influences, a painterly use of color and material, and the spatial and structural disequilibrium popularized by experimental LA architecture in the late '80s and '90s — has gotten the comprehensive study his work deserves.

Architectural historian Todd Gannon draws on archival resources, analyses of Israel’s buildings, such as the Altman House (1988), the Lamy-Newton Pavilion (1988), Propaganda Films (1988), and the Bright and Associates studios (in the former Ray and Charles Eames studio, 1991) along with interviews with many of Israel’s friends (he was a dazzling social butterfly), colleagues, clients, and contemporaries, including Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Robert A. M. Stern.

Next Thursday, Gannon will talk about his book at UCLA.

Click here for information.

Cover image, Franklin Israel Dan House, Malibu, 1995. Photo by Mike Helfrich. Image courtesy Getty Publications.

Metaphysical Objects of Significance
Marta, 3021 Rowena Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90039
Through April 5th; Wednesday–Saturday, Noon–5:00 PM

Marta, the Silver Lake-based purveyor of carefully curated functional art, continues its showings of works by Nifemi Marcus-Bello, the Lagos, Nigeria-based artist and designer who creates artful furnishings in lustrous metals with an underlying theme of the politics of extraction of raw commodities in Africa.

The third outing is entitled Oríkì (Act III): Whispers of a Trail, and consists of works made of a single, elemental material — copper.

The gallery explains that while the material is "literally of the earth — mined alongside cobalt, which, like copper, is a necessary component of lithium-ion batteries — its profusion does not correspond with widespread availability. Copper has become a rare commodity in Africa, largely due to the convoluted cycle that it’s fed into, whereby, after its extraction, the metal is exported for processing and then imported back to the continent for sale at a premium," or sourced as scrap in Lagos’ second-hand metal market.

For these works, the artist worked with both crafts- and trades-people to source and fashion copper into Headrest, Charcoal Light, Low Table, and, below, Daybed.

Click here for information.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello Daybed w_ Candleholder, 2025 Copper, Bronze 53.0 H × 76.0 W × 21.0 D in. 134.6 H × 193.0 W × 53.3 D cm Unique Edition of 4 + 1 AP Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Daybed w/ Candleholder, 2025, Copper, Bronze. Image courtesy Marta.

What I'm Digging

Bravo Liu Jiakun

The Chinese architect Liu Jiakun has been anointed winner of this year's prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. Jiakun was raised and is based in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, and forged a career as both writer and architect, whose buildings encompass a wide range of types and scales, from the "rebirth bricks" he made from the detritus following a deadly 2008 earthquake northwest of Chengdu, through the popular panda maternity ward at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, to the gigantic West Village commercial complex (2015), which fills an entire block in Chengdu with buildings, bike paths, and pedestrian walkways. The 2025 Pritzker jury wrote that he "revisits the Chinese tradition without nostalgic approach nor ambiguity, but as a springboard for innovation,” creating buildings that are at once "historical record, a piece of infrastructure, a landscape, and a remarkable public space.”

Liu Jiakun's West Village commercial complex, built in Chengdu in 2015, fills an entire block. Photo: Chin Hyosook

The Color of Money

If you've noticed a rather grim shade of gray appearing on buildings in neighborhoods that were not affluent but were cheerful-hued, know this is the color of economic change. That's according to this fascinating article in the Washington Post detailing how "rowhouses in D.C., craftsmans in Nashville, Victorian-style homes in San Francisco, and many other styles of houses in gentrifying neighborhoods across the country have increasingly been stripped of their colors and painted shades of gray." Authors Marissa J. Lang and John D. Harden explain that it goes along with sans serif type and numbers, pops of color, and other minimalist signifiers that mark a shift to monochrome in tandem with a switch from Black to white homeownership.

Screenshot 2025-03-04 at 11.32.29 AM An illustration in the Washington Post article about how paint color signifies gentrification.

Hooray for Flow

I wrote last week about the wonderful, wordless, animated film Flow, by director Gints Zilbalodis. The highlight of this weekend's Oscars for me was that it won Best Animated Feature, bringing the first-ever statuette home to Latvia, a European country formerly occupied by the Soviet Union. Flow offers a visually gorgeous, gentle parable about collaboration between divided groups following an apocalypse, and shows that you don't need to drop the F-bomb 479 times (Anora) to create greatness!

ca-times.brightspotcdn Image courtesy of A24.