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2008 Summer

That Was Then...This Is Now: Where have all the flowers gone?

Kate McNamara

Sister Mary Corita

Stop the Bombing

1967

Courtesy Corita Art Center Immaculate Heart Community

Photo by Joshua White

My mother left her Long Island, New York suburb to attend college in Los Angeles in 1969. Her mother did not speak to her for an entire week leading up to the departure, not only because she was going so far away, but because she was enrolled to attend Immaculate Heart College. What may sound like a sober institution any Irish Catholic mother would have approved of was in fact a radical university fostered by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart. The school had been given a million dollar grant to move onto the nearby Claremont campus to provide an alternative education to the otherwise less liberal nearby colleges. At that time various artists, psychologists, and philosophers were working together with the Sisters to re-envision the already progressive academic program. “I have a transcript that reads like a cultural tour of the late ’60s,” my mother told me over the phone.

Just before my mother’s arrival, That Was Then…This is Now artist Sister Corita Kent (1918–1986) had been running the Art Department at the college. Also an important educator, Corita was an activist and used her art to speak freely about the political climate of the 1960s. With the incorporation of popular culture, brightly colored graphics, and typeface texts, Corita’s serigraphs gained international recognition during the 1960s and ‘70s. With slogans like, “Come alive–Tomorrow the stars,” “MAN POW-ER! Where have all the flowers gone?,” and “Love your brother,” these prints also included war statistics and quotes from important cultural producers and leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Camus, and Leonard Cohen. Corita involved her students in the production of her works, which could often be seen wheat-pasted around the campus. Frequent visitors to her studio included such visionaries as Buckminster Fuller, Charles Eames, Ben Shahn, and Harvey Cox. In 1968, after twenty years of teaching, Corita left her position at the college and spiritual community for Boston where she continued to produce artwork until her death in 1986.

Shortly after Corita’s departure from the Sacred Heart community, the cardinal of Los Angeles issued a dictate to the nuns that they should return to the convent or leave. In the end, the Sisters chose to leave, the grant was withdrawn, and my mother moved back to the east coast: “There was a great deal of controversy and news channels were all over the campus. I was interviewed and it aired. My father’s relatives saw it and were horrified that I was as outspoken about a place that they thought was run by the devil.”