Label TextCorita Kent was an important innovator in the field of printmaking and her work is frequently historicized as part of the advent of Pop Art. After graduating high school in 1926, Corita Kent became a nun in the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Hollywood, CA—a progressive Roman Catholic order in which she participated from 1936 to 1968. She also taught art at Immaculate Heart College during most of those years and was the chair of the art department from 1964. In the mid-1960s, Kent’s prints became more political, urgently addressing racism, poverty, the Vietnam War, and other social issues. stop the bombing is exemplary of Corita Kent’s signature ability to make the written word dynamic, captivating, and propulsive. Kent built her composition from the striking contrast of large blocky blue letters and smaller handwritten passages. The work’s titular phrase was a popular antiwar slogan in the 1960s and the 1970s. The smaller text is excerpted from “I am in Vietnam…,” a poem by Gerald Huckaby.
Exhibition History
Published ReferencesSusan Dackerman, Corita Kent and the Language of Pop (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2015).
Melissa Ho, Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Exhibition History
Published ReferencesSusan Dackerman, Corita Kent and the Language of Pop (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2015).
Melissa Ho, Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Printer
Harry Hambly
DimensionsSheet: 15 5/8 x 23 in. (39.7 x 58.4 cm)
Accession Number 2026.9
Classificationsprint
CopyrightARS
SignedCorita (l,r graphite)
EditionThis print was printed in a singular run in 1967. Kent did not record edition totals, but her prints were often fairly uniform editions of either 100 or 200. According to the Corita Art Center: “Along with the work being affordable and widely available, Corita did not want any of her prints to be more valuable than the others. She did not number them and sometimes she did not even record the full size of the edition. Her prints are hand-signed though and typically were only issued as one limited edition.”
ProvenanceAnonymous educational non-profit; (Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York); Des Moines Art Center [purchased from the previous, 2026]
Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III)
10th lunar month 1863
