Primary Colors: The Story of Corita

Seventeen year old Frances Elizabeth Kent entered the Order of the Immaculate Heart Community after graduation from Catholic Girls High in Hollywood because it seemed the next step. In reality, it was the only step: she was from a large, poor family, and there were few options open to women at that time. She felt only a vague calling for the church, and even less for teaching – one of the many contradictions of her life, but “that was what nuns did.”

Re-named Sister Mary Corita, little heart, she was dismayed when, after three years of happily teaching Indian children in Canada, the summons came to teach art at her alma mater, the Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood. Her mother superior remembers Corita huddled on a basement stairway crying, “Just because I can draw a stick figures doesn’t mean I can teach art!” but Time would soon call her “the world’s best-known teaching nun.”

She took her classes to a Sunset Boulevard carwash, to the Watts towers, to a neighborhood supermarket in search of inspiration. Students remember the diminutive nun flying kites in her habit, wading in the ocean, conducting unorthodox classes that were “wild, free-for-all, wonderful places.” She conducted outrageous “happenings” involving poetry, confetti, and paper hats. Energetic, endlessly creative, Corita put her stamp on art – and the Church.

By 1968, Corita was caught up in a frenetic lifestyle of teaching, painting, arranging exhibits, lecturing and traveling and she found herself a reluctant celebrity. She was the Los Angeles Times’ Woman of the Year, on the cover of Newsweek, publishing books, traveling the world, making talk show appearances – and still waiting tables in the priests’ dining room! She was on the verge of exhaustion when Cardinal McIntyre, who considered her work blasphemous, set up a Bishops’ committee to investigate the Immaculate Heart Community. It was time for “the next step,” so Corita went to Boston. Her decision to leave the church was not a retaliatory act or a rejection of religion. On the contrary, she left to get closer to God through her personal freedom and her art.

Corita Kent led a life of contradictions. She was a teacher and a revolutionary; an artist who symbolized hope despite her own tragedy; a nun who left the church at age 50 to find God – and herself.

Narrated be Eva Marie Saint, this film probes the life of a uniquely gifted artist whose civil rights and anti-war statements became the voice of a generation. The creator of the world’s largest painting (the Boston Gas tank rainbow) and the smallest (the “Love” postage stamp), Corita used words and vibrant color to make her indelible message of love and hope.