Corita Kent serigraph, 1976
Photo by Kevin Grady/Radcliffe Institute
In 1976, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a leader in the computer industry, commissioned the pop artist Corita Kent to design panels to adorn the sides of its computers, cubicle walls, and office furniture. Kent created six serigraphs of colorful swaths, but DEC never produced the panels. In 2015, serendipitously coinciding with a major exhibition of Kent’s work, Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, at the Harvard Art Museum and our own exhibit Corita Kent: Footnotes and Headlines, the Library was offered the chance to acquire an extremely rare set of the panels, one of which you see here, from the DEC employee who commissioned them.
Kent, who earlier in life had been a college art teacher and a nun with the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in California, is best known in the Boston area for another commercial commission, this one by Boston Gas in 1971: a 150-foot-high gas tank with rainbow-colored stripes, which she called Rainbow Swash.
Corita Papers, Schlesinger Library
Catalog record:
http://id.lib.harvard.edu/aleph/002063144/catalog
Learn more:
Discover more about the Schlesinger Library’s exhibit Corita Kent: Footnotes and Headlines.
And read about Rainbow Swash.
