Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking
UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
February 6 - April 2, 2000
The exhibition "Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking," organized by artist Julie Ault, presents a dynamic visual dialogue between two artists of different generations. Both Sister Corita Kent and Donald Moffett have engaged bold graphic design and montage techniques to form compositions that communicate their ideas and social convictions.
For Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986), later known simply as Corita, distribution as a populist principle was key in determining her medium of expression. She learned printmaking in order to reproduce affordable images in large volume. Hailed the "modern nun" on the cover of "Newsweek" Magazine in 1966, Sister Corita embraced the new freedoms engendered by the Vatican Council II in her art and in her capacity as teacher and chair of the art department at the Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Using her art as a platform in the 1960s, Sister Corita Kent turned her attention to issues ranging from conflicts between radical and conservative positions in the Catholic Church; advertising and market culture; U.S. imperialism abroad in Vietnam; and racism at home. By 1969, suffering from frequent censure from local Church officials, among other factors, she left the order and her religious community and moved to Boston, Massachusetts. Her serigraphs included in "Power Up" span the 1960s and include examples from the Grunwald Center's extensive collection of serigraphs bequeathed to the Center by Corita herself.
As artist, designer and activist, Donald Moffett (b.1955) has broadly contributed to the gay liberation and AIDS-activist movements. Moffett's art is conceptually driven and includes photographs, paintings, sculpture, postcards and posters. A member of the collective "Gran Fury" from 1987-1993, Moffett worked individually and collaboratively on graphic campaigns designed to communicate the seriousness of the AIDS crisis. Moffett made a series of images in the form of disarmingly simple photo-text montages for the "Age of AIDS" column in "The Village Voice," a New York weekly newspaper. These temporal pieces relied on metaphor and expressed commentary in visual shorthand form, often with complex implications and wicked humor. These works are featured in "Power Up," alongside Moffett's mixed media works addressing public morality as interpreted and legislated by conservative religious and political institutions. The serigraphs of Sister Corita Kent and the mixed-media works of New York-based Moffett are juxtaposed in "Power Up" to show both artists and their works in a new context.
Beginning with her work with "Group Material" (1979-1996), a collective which organized exhibitions and public projects that explored interrelationships between politics and aesthetics, Julie Ault takes on the role of curator as part of her artistic practice. Julie Ault has said "I view an exhibition akin to an artwork in which every conceptual and concrete aspect requires attention and involves choice, not convention. An exhibition is not simply a frame for presenting artworks or artifacts; from its overall structure to its every detail an exhibition is content itself."
Julie Ault's lively exhibition design for "Power Up" derives from the formal features and aesthetic strategies of Corita's and Moffett's artworks. Ault's installation of "Power Up" includes the construction of displays and seating, overlaid in news articles or quotations to illustrate the context in which the artists created their work. Ault's exhibition deepens the rich legacy and interplay of art, design and social relevance.
Also on view in the exhibition are Baylis Glascock's film "Corita Kent: On Teaching and Celebration" and "Target City Hall," a video produced by DIVA TV in 1989 about one demonstration organized by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP).
The "Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking" exhibition is an expanded version of a project Ault originally organized for the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1997.
UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024
