Like most of Corita Kent’s work, this screenprint takes its type from a previously printed piece of packaging or advertisement. Kent manipulated her source material in front of the camera and cut up the enlarged result as a stencil. The rest of the text (which is typically religious, philosophical, and poetic all at once) is written by hand.

November 20, 2019 was officially deemed Corita Day in Los Angeles in honor of what would be Corita Kent’s 101st birthday.

Damn Everything But the Circus is a 1970 book compiling Corita Kent’s Circus print series of 1968. The title comes from a poem by e.e. cummings:

Damn everything but the circus!

...damn everything that is grim, dull,
motionless, unrisking, inward turning,
damn everything that won't get into the
circle, that won't enjoy, that won't throw
its heart into the tension, surprise, fear
and delight of the circus, the round
world, the full existence...

The main type appears to have once been Playbill — either in wood or metal. I say “once been” because, as far as I know, Kent rarely used fonts directly. Instead, she photographed, enlarged, cropped, and otherwise manipulated printed material, making the previously used type and images into stencils for screen printing. The original 23×23-inch prints (see circus alphabet: d, everything coming up daisies) were reproduced for this book using standard offset lithography.

November 20, 2019 was officially deemed Corita Day in Los Angeles in honor of what would be Corita Kent’s 101st birthday.

Process material for the print, w what every woman knows.

In pop art fashion, Sister Corita often used advertising and packaging as source material for her serigraphs, often enlarging typographic elements and distorting them before cutting stencils to be used for her prints.

“I took pictures from magazines and combined them the way I wanted, and then I would curl the paper to go the way I wanted it to and shoot the photograph, the slide, and then enlarge that and cut the stencil from that.” — Corita Kent oral history, 1976

Many of her pieces use ad slogans to communicate messages about Christian theology. This piece draws its main content from Seven-Up’s “Wet & Wild” campaign.

23×23 inches. Part of the circus alphabet series of posters printed in 1968. The main type is Chermayeff & Geismar’s experimental typeface made famous just the year before in their work for The Electric Circus nightclub in New York. And perhaps the text is actually a fragment of an Electric Circus flyer since many of the elements in Corita’s work are samples from existing prints.

The complete circus alphabet series.