Joyous Revolutionary

Between sessions at a conference on religion and the arts at the New York Hilton last week, delegates wandered through a maze of 1,500 cardboard boxes stacked seven feet high in two exhibition halls. Pasted on the vividly painted cartons were collages of photographs from Viet Nam, Newark and Vogue, bits of magazine ads, scribbled quotations from John Kennedy, Albert Camus and Beatle John Lennon. In effect, the exhibit -- entitled "Survival with Style"-- was a dramatic plea to man's conscience. A message in blank verse invited viewers to mull over the maze and "find alternatives to war to poverty to pain."

The maze -- done by students at Los Angeles' Immaculate Heart College un der the direction and guidance of Sister Mary Corita Kent, 49 -- is the latest project of the nation's best-known teaching nun. Sister Corita's own vibrant silk-screen serigraphs have been pur chased by leading museums in Europe and the U.S., and last year were exhibited at 150 shows. Versatile and prolific, she did a large serigraph exhibit for the Vatican pavilion at the New York World's Fair, designed advertisements for Westinghouse, and gift wrapping for Neiman-Marcus. Her friends range from Buckminster Fuller to Ben Shahn, who describes her as a "joyous revolutionary."

Pop Prayer. Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Sister Corita began teaching at Immaculate Heart in 1946, later received a master's in art history from the University of Southern California. Over the years, her style has progressed from representational to fullblown pop. If her technique is secular, so in many ways is her outlook. "I don't find a great difference between what's religious and not religious," she says. "As a Christian, if you believe God became man, you figure that he meant it seriously, and all we have of this world is very good. If Christ were alive today, he'd take people to the movies instead of telling them parables."

A swinging example of her work has been published jointly by the United Church Press and the Roman Catholic firm of Herder and Herder. Footnotes and Headlines: A Play-Pray Book is a 50-page volume of mod meditations filled with brilliant swatches of color and eye-catching graphics. Most of Sister Corita's serigraphs use kaleidoscopic excerpts from advertising slogans blown up and tossed across the pages, often upside down, sideways or in mirror images. Accompanying them are quotations that range from Hasidic folk tales to Marshall McLuhan, all tied together with Sister Corita's own blank verse celebrating love, peace, action--and God. In this context the reader suddenly discovers that Chevrolet's slogan, "See the man who can save you the most," may have religious overtones. So can "Wonder helps build strong bodies 12 ways," improvising on the Wonder Bread slogan.

Not all believers take to Sister Corita's jaunty appropriation of advertising slogans to make a spiritual point. Her answer, in Footnotes and Headlines, is that "the most noble words can become ineffective cliches. But cliches when put into a new context can become uncliched . . . which is to discover that they are no longer ordinary."

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