Corita Kent and the Art of "Slow Looking"

During the 1960s, the art department at Immaculate Heart College, under the supervision of Corita Kent, became a lively community of experimentation and creative thinking. Corita encouraged her students to approach their art and studies as global citizens. She motivated them to look beyond the confines of the classroom and take into account the world at large.

Through creative and innovative means, Corita Kent helped her students reconsider what it meant to be artists and showed them how to look at the world with new eyes. One technique Corita used to do this involved “finders.” These were simply 35mm slide mounts, pieces of cardboard with a square cutout in the middle, that were used to mimic the viewfinder of a camera.

“A tool for looking is a finder. This is a device which does the same thing as the camera lens or viewfinder. It helps take things out of context, allows us to see for the sake of seeing, and enhances our quick-looking and decision-making skills.”
– Corita Kent from Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit (with Jan Steward).

Corita would often take her classes out on field trips to bustling intersections, full of different visual stimuli vying for attention, and challenge her students to isolate certain components of the urban landscape using their finders. She encouraged them to look at scenes with different perspectives and to crop out certain elements to take in specific details outside of a larger context. Corita referred to this practice as “visual decision-making.”

The implementation of these “finders” came from Corita’s own fascination with photography. The camera’s viewfinder became an integral tool for Corita Kent’s serigraph practice — she would go around photographing various advertisements, signs, and billboards that were used as inspiration for her own art. Through her methods of cropping, Corita isolated larger images into distinct shapes, colors, and letters that would inspire the visual language of her screenprints.

Corita Kent pushed the envelope of the art world not only with her own work but also through her teaching. Corita Kent’s “finders” continue to serve as reminders that it’s always important to slow down and take a look at the world in different ways. Every Blackwing 93 subscription comes with our own version of Corita’s “finders,” so you can practice “visual decision-making” for yourself.