In honor of WomensDay2020, we're sharing some of our favorite stories about women in history.
Imagine a crowd of young women wearing vividly-colored clothing with flowers in their hair, converging under a sea of signs and banners with bright, colorful images and slogans inspired by supermarket products— “Fresh Eggs,” “God Likes Canned Peaches”—waving under a bright blue sky. Acoustic guitars strum folk songs while people sing and dance along. Now, imagine that this celebration is also full of Catholic nuns in traditional habits, wearing flower garlands over their black-and-white wimples.
Born in 1918, Frances Elizabeth Kent was the fifth of six children. She was born in Iowa, but her family soon moved to Hollywood, California, where they settled during the glory days of silent film. Kent was interested in art from a young age. “I can remember always making things, like designing things, paper dolls and their clothes, and then drawing,” she said in a 1977 interview for a UCLA oral history project. Catholicism also played a large role in her life and her family very early on.
Kent completed two prints during that class. The following summer, in 1952, she looked at one of the prints with fresh eyes and new ideas. “It was really so bad that I started adding colors on top of it, making a completely new print,” she recalled in the UCLA interview. “It turned into a completely different picture because underneath it was a picture of the Assumption, with a very, as I remember it, kind of fashion-modelish lady in the center. It was a very unwholesome picture.
Kent saw the hand of God in the vernacular language of everyday life. She took the Exxon catchphrase, “Put a tiger in your tank,” and used it as a channel to the higher sprit. “‘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,” Kent said in the oral history.
Corita Kent,"Manflowers," 1969, Serigraph, 23 X 12 IN., Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles
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