Students in Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne’s art class are learning how to see works of art in the way that other artists have interpreted art before them.
“2D Studio Art students are currently exploring abstraction and the work of artist Corita Kent,” Ms. G explains. “Corita Kent was an artist and educator, and the motto of the art department at Immaculate Heart College where she taught was, ‘We have no art, we do everything as well as we can.'”
Kent often utilized a small viewfinder tool and encouraged students to look at the world around them in small abstracted parts in order to take in the beauty all around us.
“She championed art as essential and for all of us,” Goldthwaite says.
Quoting from Corita Kent’s book Learning by Heart: Teaching to Free the Creative Spirit, Goldthwaite notes: “To work, play, see, touch, laugh, cry, build, and use it all – even the painful parts, and survive with style: that’s what Corita taught. She taught that art is not something apart from life and living.”
