Where have all the flowers gone? The new dawn of Corita Kent

In 1955, Pete Seeger scotch‑taped a song to a microphone and sang it at Oberlin College. The tune was spare, almost plainspoken, but its question cut deep: Where have all the flowers gone? A lyric about war’s recursive toll, about memory slipping through generations. When will they ever learn?

That same year, the acquittal of two white men for the lynching of 14‑year‑old Emmett Till sent a shockwave through the country. Images of Till’s mutilated body circulated widely by Jet magazine, igniting a civil rights movement that was already gathering force. America was learning, slowly and violently, how images could bear witness, provoke outrage, and demand moral reckoning.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a Catholic nun, art educator, and social justice activist was quietly collecting the visual language of everyday life. With a 35mm camera, Sister Corita Kent photographed traffic cones and billboards, classroom projects and supermarket signage, cookies and puppets, used‑car lots and sunflowers, Mary’s Day celebrations and city streets. She photographed her students, her friends Charles and Ray Eames, and the dense, contradictory life of Los Angeles itself. Ordinary things. Charged things. Language in the wild.

Of her photography practice, Kent wrote, “I think that I am always collecting in a way – walking down a street with my eyes open, looking through a magazine, viewing a movie, visiting a museum or grocery store.”

Between 1955-1968, while teaching lettering, layout, image‑finding, and visual structure in the art department at Immaculate Heart College, Kent amassed more than 15,000 35mm slides. This archive, recently distilled into the exhibition Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images at the Marciano Art Foundation, reveals the engine of her practice: looking as devotion, collecting as discipline.

Edited and composed by Michelle Silva, the exhibition presented roughly 1,100 slides across three monumental screens. Visitors sunk into bean bags as images appeared in triads, advancing at one‑minute intervals. The pacing was deliberate, almost liturgical. Three images would arrive, pause, and hold – long enough to invite comparison, resonance, contradiction.

Though The Sorcery of Images has sunset, Kent’s full slide archive – and a rich collection of ephemera, publications, and prints – lives at the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles. The Center continues to make this material accessible to researchers and the public alike, including through current exhibitions like Heroes and Sheroes, which foreground a pivotal moment in Kent’s practice.

Created between 1968-1969, the heroes and sheroes series marks a turning point. Produced after Kent took a sabbatical from Immaculate Heart College and ultimately left the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, these 29 prints engage directly with the political realities of the era: labour and civil rights, the war in Vietnam, disarming nuclear weapons, and political assassination. Kent was not a street radical, though her work is unmistakably aligned.

In the cry that will be heard, Kent lifts imagery from a Life magazine cover and pairs it with lyrics from the protest song Give a Damn by Spanky & Gang. The issue, featuring photo‑essays by Gordon Parks, Gerald Moore, and Jack Newfield, exposed cycles of poverty and racial injustice in Harlem, Chicago’s West Side, and Bedford‑Stuyvesant. Kent’s intervention is graphic, not illustrative. Through scale, contrast, and typographic emphasis, she amplifies the moral urgency already embedded in the image.

A similar strategy unfolds in king’s dream. Here, Kent juxtaposes a bold serif with a softer companion and layers handwritten text beneath. The excerpts come from two speeches delivered on the same day – 30 January, 1948. A sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. and Jawaharlal Nehru’s radio address to the people of India following Gandhi’s assassination. Red, white, and blue saturate the composition. She is speaking to America and the world at large. The design does not resolve the tension it presents. Instead, it hands the question back to the viewer: When will they ever learn?