Medieval imagery and pop art may seem an unlikely combination, but they merged into a new form of iconography in the work of American artist and educator Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita. Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1918, Corita entered the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 and went on to lead the art department at the order’s college after completing a master’s degree at the University of Southern California in 1951. Her first recognition came shortly after, as she won first prize in both the Los Angeles County and California State Fair print competitions for her striking and colorful serigraph the lord is with thee, influenced by the medieval works she studied. Over the next decade, she produced vivid screenprints that drew from both German and abstract expressionism, but it was when she first saw Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in Los Angeles that she had an aesthetic conversion and produced her first pop art print, a set of twelve shapes in different colors with the subtly Christian title wonderbread (1962).

She quickly became a mainstay of the postwar art world with her work, incorporating biblical verses or religious quotes from writers such as François Mauriac, as well as pop lyrics and advertising slogans, without passing judgment on which contained the greatest truth or meaning. Soon the Catholic Church itself honored her with a commission to create a banner for the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Neither this nor her commissions for corporations such as IBM or the Boston Gas Company (for whom she created the world’s largest copyrighted artwork, the Rainbow Swash, painted on a 140-foot-tall gas tank) led her to change her approach for profit. She continued to focus on screenprints, which were affordable to people other than wealthy collectors — and she refused to number them, so none became more valuable than any other.

Corita left the order on good terms in 1968, finding it incompatible with her prolific output — almost eight hundred editions of silkscreen prints, thousands of watercolor paintings, and numerous public and private commissions — as well as her teaching and exhibition schedules. Although she was never a significant presence in any artistic group or political movement, her work began to engage more explicitly with the problems of poverty and racism throughout the 1960s; the “heroes and sheroes” she included in one set of prints placed Martin Luther King Jr and Cesar Chavez alongside God. Once she began living on her own in Boston, her work became sparser and, to an extent, more introspective — especially after she was diagnosed with cancer in 1974. Corita did not renounce her celebrity as she took on major commissions such as a billboard for Physicians for Social Responsibility, an anti-nuclear organization. A simple painting of grass and sky under the slogan “we can create life without war,” she called it the “most religious thing” she had ever done.