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Corita Kent: The Pop Art Nun
Published March 21, 2025

Corita Kent: The Pop Art Nun

I recently came across this short PBS Artbound documentary from 2021 on artist, educator, and social justice advocate Corita Kent (1918-1986), which is well worth 20 minutes of your time.

I don’t remember when I first came across Sister Corita’s work. It was probably not until I moved to Canada and became more interested in design and applying typography and lettering to art. Certainly, she was not someone I learnt about in school. It’s hard to know whether that is the result of a parochial British education, or more generalized misogyny and prejudice in art history, or a bit both. But, as the documentary makes clear, she remains a source of inspiration for artists, designers, and teachers 40 years after her death.

The ‘Ten Rules’ she helped create with the students of the Immaculate Heart College Art Department seem as relevant today as they must have at the time they were first written:

You can listen to former students, artists, community organizers, and others read and reflect on the Ten Rules here.

(Video via Letterform Archive!)

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Published September 2, 2016

Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words

Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words is a short documentary, commissioned by MOCA in Los Angeles, exploring two of the recurring themes in the artist’s work. It was written and directed by Felipe Lima, and is narrated by Owen Wilson:

Apparently Ruscha calls his font ‘Boy Scout Utility Modern’, which immediately makes me wonder if Wes Anderson is a fan.

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Published August 18, 2016

Welcome to The Last Bookstore

Welcome to The Last Bookstore is a short, inspiring documentary about Josh Spencer, owner and operator of The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles:

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Published February 24, 2015

Jesse and the Typewriter Shop

Related to yesterday’s post on Gramercy Typewriter Co. in New York, here’s a short film about U.S. Office Machines, one of the last remaining typewriter repair shops in Los Angeles:

https://vimeo.com/43212146

(Thanks Sam!)

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Published July 28, 2014

Church of Type

church-of-type
Church of Type is the new letterpress studio in Santa Monica, California, of veteran designer and printmaker Kevin Bradley. In this lovely short film, Bradley talks about relocating to Los Angeles, typography, the printing press, and making things by hand:

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Published February 26, 2014

Eve Babitz: Muse and Writer

Lili Anolik on the stranger-than-fiction life of Eve Babitz, “an irresistible hybrid of boho intellectual and L.A. party girl”, for Vanity Fair:

Eve Babitz’s claims to fame rest, in large measure, on her claims on the famous. She’s the goddaughter, of course, of one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Then there’s that photograph of the chess match with Marcel Duchamp, Eve contemplating her next move without so much as a fig leaf for cover. And what about the series of Adams, better known than the original, some of them, to whom she offered her forbidden fruit? Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, Ed Ruscha, J. D. Souther, Stephen Stills, Glenn Frey, Harrison Ford, Warren Zevon, Ahmet Ertegun all took a bite at one time or another.

If that were her whole story, however, Eve wouldn’t be a whole story. She’d be a footnote. A minor figure of glamour in America’s cultural history. A groupie with a provocative pedigree. She’d be Edie Sedgwick, basically: so relentless a companion to celebrity that she became a bit of one herself, the spotlight just naturally spilling over onto her, making her luminous, too. But she’s not. Eve is Edie cut with Gertrude Stein and a little Louise Brooks thrown in.

Why?… Eve could write.

(pictured above: Eve Babitz, chessboard, and Marcel Duchamp, photograph by Julian Wasser, 1963)

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Published September 13, 2013

TateShots: Ed Ruscha’s Photography Books

In this new TateShots video, artist Ed Ruscha talks about the “cultural curiosities” — the gas stations, swimming pools and parking lots of Los Angeles — that he photographed for his books:

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Published September 4, 2013

The Last Bookstore

At The Paris Review, Casey N. Cep visits  The Last Bookstore in (where else?) Los Angeles :

The Last Bookstore has some of the most beautiful book art I’ve ever seen. You can wander and wander through this wonderland of cuttings, foldings, installations, and sculptures. Some pages are folded, others torn; the books are shaped into birds and windows, transformed into storyscapes independent of their original stories.

Book art might be called an epitaph for our relationship with the printed word. Its power comes almost entirely from the materials that it memorializes. Without the bindings or the recognizable spines, these works of art would cease to invoke their source. And in order to be moved by the work of art, we need to recognize the book, or even the idea of the book.

The setting, the Last Bookstore—apocalyptic, but also an increasingly plausible—makes this association easier, but it still seems clear that none of these works can succeed if they transform the book beyond recognition. The epitaph works only when we recognize its referent. There is both terror and beauty in every work of book art: the printed word mangled, but also memorialized; pages destroyed, but also preserved; books dead, but also resurrected. The Last Bookstore is equal parts mausoleum, shrine, and warehouse.

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