What do you think?
Rate this book
New Rules Next Week: Corita Kent's Legacy through the Eyes of Twenty Artists and Writers
Twenty contemporary artists and writers reimagine Corita Kent's iconic creative manifesto.
Known for her vibrant and powerful serigraphs, Corita Kent left an equally important legacy through her teaching. In the late 1960s, she and her students at the Immaculate Heart College developed their Art Department Rules. From "Consider everything an experiment" to "Be happy whenever you can manage it," these ten deceptively simple principles capture the magic of Corita’s approach to creativity, culture, and activism. In this volume, ten writers and ten artists look back at the rules and show us how vital and resonant they remain today. The wide-ranging roster of contributors includes Vashti Harrison, Lisa Congdon, Natacha Ramsay-Levi, Dan Paley, and Erin Jang.
COMPELLING AND INSPIRING Corita Kent was a Roman Catholic nun, a wildly popular pop artist, a social justice advocate, and a beloved art teacher. Her Art Department Rules continue to speak to people today. This book celebrates the way Corita's work resonates through contemporary art and offers inspiration for your own creative practice.
TWENTY AMAZING Illustrators, designers, educators, curators, former students and colleagues of Corita's—the illustrious contributors to this volume offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the artist's legacy.
PERFECT This book makes an impactful gift for creative minds, especially students. The ten rules offer encouragement and guidance to anyone who aspires to begin or expand an artistic practice.
Perfect
Known for her vibrant and powerful serigraphs, Corita Kent left an equally important legacy through her teaching. In the late 1960s, she and her students at the Immaculate Heart College developed their Art Department Rules. From "Consider everything an experiment" to "Be happy whenever you can manage it," these ten deceptively simple principles capture the magic of Corita’s approach to creativity, culture, and activism. In this volume, ten writers and ten artists look back at the rules and show us how vital and resonant they remain today. The wide-ranging roster of contributors includes Vashti Harrison, Lisa Congdon, Natacha Ramsay-Levi, Dan Paley, and Erin Jang.
COMPELLING AND INSPIRING Corita Kent was a Roman Catholic nun, a wildly popular pop artist, a social justice advocate, and a beloved art teacher. Her Art Department Rules continue to speak to people today. This book celebrates the way Corita's work resonates through contemporary art and offers inspiration for your own creative practice.
TWENTY AMAZING Illustrators, designers, educators, curators, former students and colleagues of Corita's—the illustrious contributors to this volume offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the artist's legacy.
PERFECT This book makes an impactful gift for creative minds, especially students. The ten rules offer encouragement and guidance to anyone who aspires to begin or expand an artistic practice.
Perfect
- GenresNonfictionArt
88 pages, Hardcover
Published June 27, 2023
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 16, 2025
Thank you Scott ❤️
April 27, 2026
(from the introduction)
About the Title
At the very bottom of the list of ten rules are Helpful Hints. Among them is "There should be new rules next week," which offers freedom to the reader to go forth in their pursuits. It's a wink and a nod that reminds us that rules are not ironclad, that life can be joyously unpredictable, and that one should always remain open to new ideas. We hope that this compilation of stories and artwork encourages the next generation of doers and makers to create new rules.
About Corita Kent
Corita Kent was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice who worked primarily in serigraphy. Born Frances Elizabeth Kent on November 20, 1918, in lowa, Corita was raised mainly in Los Angeles. She entered the religious order Immaculate Heart of Mary in Hollywood at age 18. After teaching secondary school in Los Angeles and then briefly in the Pacific Northwest, Corita was called back to teach art at Immaculate Heart College.
Under the direction of Corita and Sister Magdalen Mary, the art department became a well-known center of creativity and liberal thinking with a recognizable aesthetic style. In the early 1950s, Corita began printmak-ing. Influenced by the medieval art she was studying while obtaining her master's degree at the University of Southern California, her early work was figurative and religious.
Until 1967, Corita produced prints in the college studio during her breaks between teaching summer school and the start of the fall semester, averaging 20 different prints in editions ranging from 25 to 200. During that time, her work incorporated advertising images and slogans, popular song lyrics, biblical verses, and literature. Her vibrant and socially conscious artwork became enormously popular. By 1968, she had shown in over 230 exhibitions, and her work was collected in public and private collections worldwide. Throughout the 1960s, her work became increasingly political, urging viewers to consider poverty, racism, and injustice. Always resistant to the division between fine and commercial work, Corita took commissions large and small during her career, from greeting cards to book jackets and illustrations, posters, billboards, and even a US postage stamp.
In 1968, exhausted from conflict with the Los Angeles archdiocese and a frenetic schedule of exhibiting, teaching, and lecturing around the country, Corita sought dispensation from her vows and moved to Boston. She continued to work in serigraphy and developed a plein air watercolor practice.
After 1970, Corita's work evolved into a sparser, more introspective style influenced by her new environment, secular life, and battles with cancer. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986. At the time of her death, she had created nearly 800 serigraph editions, hundreds of watercol-ors, and numerous public and private commissions.
Corta bequeathed her copyrights and unsold art to the Immaculate Heart Community (IC). Recognizing the continuing relevance and importance of her art and teaching, IHC created the Corita Art Center to keep her legacy alive for generations to come. With thousands of original serigraphs, water-colors, and archival materials, the Corita Art Center is the largest and most comprehensive archive of Corita's work. Learn more about Corita Art Center and Corita Kent by visiting corita.org or following @coritaartcenter.
*
Rule 1:
Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
*
Through attention, I gain my freedom, my emancipation, and my power to act. Attention determines what I will be tomorrow by allowing me to choose what I see and hear today. If it is true that we are what we eat, then we are what we watch and listen to.
But with the phrase "for a while," Corita reminds us that nothing is permanent, that neither this quest nor this attention ever remains static. The nature of attention is "not to hold in place." Attention is an exceptional, abnormal state, which cannot last long because it is in contradiction with the fundamental condition of psychic life: change. Cathy N. Davidson praises the merits of continuous partial attention: "In our global, diverse, interactive world, where everything seems to have a hidden side, continuous partial attention could well be not only a condition of life, but also a precious instrument for navigating this complex world. This will be all the more true if we manage to compensate for our own partial attention by collaborating with others who can see what we are missing. Only then can we increase our chances of success and hope to see the hidden side of things—as well as the hidden side of that hidden side itself."
The creative process involves a lot of spontaneity, and I believe that with her first rule, Corita encourages us to temporarily fix our attention, in order to find the right place between lamenting information overload and marveling at the experience of curiosity. (15)
*
Corita understood that as students we had to unlearn much of what we thought we knew. In order to jolt us out of timeworn ways of seeing and making, Corita assigned seemingly impossible tasks: bring in one hundred original drawings by Friday; over the weekend, carve two alphabets out of rubber erasers; practice drawing with your eyes closed for as long as you can; write out five wonderful quotes using chopsticks dipped in black India ink; concentrate on the spaces around objects rather than on the objects themselves to discover new meanings within the blanks. Corita famously had us make "finders" by cutting rectangles in scraps of heavy paper. She coached us on using the finders for "slow looking," focusing on a portion of a whole without being overly distracted by content. (20)
*
Her research, fueled by her insatiable curiosity and chronic insomnia, became an open invitation to pause, reflect, intercon-nect, and see art-making as important and socially valuable. Five decades after the rules were first conceived, they remain a timely guide. With huge amounts of data at our fingertips today, we can try—perhaps more readily than ever—to pull everything out of our teachers, our mentors, and each other. It's still a big ask. The good news? As Corita reminded us, there will be new rules next week. (33)
*
Corita's students chose to follow her even when she assigned hundreds of drawings for homework. These assignments pushed them through the process to teach them discipline and, if they wanted to complete the drawings, to resist perfection—something with the power to halt production altogether. Corita called them to reach, beyond their toil, to a greater discipline.
Corita's discipline was love for the world and she disciplined herself to express it through art. […] to be disciplined is to follow in a good way-developing the craft and work ethic required to create. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way— finding the greater purpose that animates an artist to endure the hard work of creating. What's your discipline? (47)
*
All must belong. It can be referred to as
"yes, and." Corita worked on not separating things. Art and life: yes, and! Win and fail: yes, and! There are, indeed, no mistakes when dichotomies are out the window.
Of course, much discouragement can arise when so much needs to be reconsidered, rethought, and remade. This may be why Corita taught her students many techniques to develop and trust their senses. We know now this is an effective way to regulate our emotions and be present in the moment, despite anxiety. Unease and creativity: yes, and! Through exercises of visual and auditory observation, she taught young artists to be in the world, not separate from it. When your homework is to pay attention to all you can hear—in your immediate vicinity, then far off, then as far as you possibly can—you are quickly reminded in a visceral way that the world, as unstable as it might be, is an endlessly rich source. When you are taught to observe a space (a gas station, of all places) for four hours through a little hole cut in a piece of paper, you see for yourself that anything can be a starting point. And the good news is that one can start in the middle. In the here and now. Through mundane little steps. In Corita's words, "doing and making are acts of hope." Tragedy would be to never start at all.
*
Rule 9:
Be happy whenever you can manage it.
Enjoy yourself.
It's lighter than you think.
Sometimes the worst experiences can be met as challenges or opportunities that drive us toward self-examination and real change. Nature, beginning with our own bodies, is in a constant state of flux and seasonality. Illness and loss brought me closer to mortality, and a rapid succession of X quantities fol-lowed, including working with the full color spectrum, gesture, and the natural world. After all, time and tide wait for no one. Art remains an expression of our own humanity and provides us with important release and learning.
The rules themselves remain a personal touchstone for me. Leaving room for X quantities (Rule 10) might even include leaving space for happiness and enjoyment (Rule 9), which is especially important for "the people who do all of the work all the time" (Rule 7). Looking through the lens of time and experience, I feel as though the complexity of the rules is also a window into Corita's world as an artist and teacher, beginning with her name. Sister Mary Corita became Corita Kent, with whole new sequences of X quantities to be discovered in secular life, moving from Los Angeles to Boston, painting and learning. (80)
About the Title
At the very bottom of the list of ten rules are Helpful Hints. Among them is "There should be new rules next week," which offers freedom to the reader to go forth in their pursuits. It's a wink and a nod that reminds us that rules are not ironclad, that life can be joyously unpredictable, and that one should always remain open to new ideas. We hope that this compilation of stories and artwork encourages the next generation of doers and makers to create new rules.
About Corita Kent
Corita Kent was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice who worked primarily in serigraphy. Born Frances Elizabeth Kent on November 20, 1918, in lowa, Corita was raised mainly in Los Angeles. She entered the religious order Immaculate Heart of Mary in Hollywood at age 18. After teaching secondary school in Los Angeles and then briefly in the Pacific Northwest, Corita was called back to teach art at Immaculate Heart College.
Under the direction of Corita and Sister Magdalen Mary, the art department became a well-known center of creativity and liberal thinking with a recognizable aesthetic style. In the early 1950s, Corita began printmak-ing. Influenced by the medieval art she was studying while obtaining her master's degree at the University of Southern California, her early work was figurative and religious.
Until 1967, Corita produced prints in the college studio during her breaks between teaching summer school and the start of the fall semester, averaging 20 different prints in editions ranging from 25 to 200. During that time, her work incorporated advertising images and slogans, popular song lyrics, biblical verses, and literature. Her vibrant and socially conscious artwork became enormously popular. By 1968, she had shown in over 230 exhibitions, and her work was collected in public and private collections worldwide. Throughout the 1960s, her work became increasingly political, urging viewers to consider poverty, racism, and injustice. Always resistant to the division between fine and commercial work, Corita took commissions large and small during her career, from greeting cards to book jackets and illustrations, posters, billboards, and even a US postage stamp.
In 1968, exhausted from conflict with the Los Angeles archdiocese and a frenetic schedule of exhibiting, teaching, and lecturing around the country, Corita sought dispensation from her vows and moved to Boston. She continued to work in serigraphy and developed a plein air watercolor practice.
After 1970, Corita's work evolved into a sparser, more introspective style influenced by her new environment, secular life, and battles with cancer. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986. At the time of her death, she had created nearly 800 serigraph editions, hundreds of watercol-ors, and numerous public and private commissions.
Corta bequeathed her copyrights and unsold art to the Immaculate Heart Community (IC). Recognizing the continuing relevance and importance of her art and teaching, IHC created the Corita Art Center to keep her legacy alive for generations to come. With thousands of original serigraphs, water-colors, and archival materials, the Corita Art Center is the largest and most comprehensive archive of Corita's work. Learn more about Corita Art Center and Corita Kent by visiting corita.org or following @coritaartcenter.
*
Rule 1:
Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
*
Through attention, I gain my freedom, my emancipation, and my power to act. Attention determines what I will be tomorrow by allowing me to choose what I see and hear today. If it is true that we are what we eat, then we are what we watch and listen to.
But with the phrase "for a while," Corita reminds us that nothing is permanent, that neither this quest nor this attention ever remains static. The nature of attention is "not to hold in place." Attention is an exceptional, abnormal state, which cannot last long because it is in contradiction with the fundamental condition of psychic life: change. Cathy N. Davidson praises the merits of continuous partial attention: "In our global, diverse, interactive world, where everything seems to have a hidden side, continuous partial attention could well be not only a condition of life, but also a precious instrument for navigating this complex world. This will be all the more true if we manage to compensate for our own partial attention by collaborating with others who can see what we are missing. Only then can we increase our chances of success and hope to see the hidden side of things—as well as the hidden side of that hidden side itself."
The creative process involves a lot of spontaneity, and I believe that with her first rule, Corita encourages us to temporarily fix our attention, in order to find the right place between lamenting information overload and marveling at the experience of curiosity. (15)
*
Corita understood that as students we had to unlearn much of what we thought we knew. In order to jolt us out of timeworn ways of seeing and making, Corita assigned seemingly impossible tasks: bring in one hundred original drawings by Friday; over the weekend, carve two alphabets out of rubber erasers; practice drawing with your eyes closed for as long as you can; write out five wonderful quotes using chopsticks dipped in black India ink; concentrate on the spaces around objects rather than on the objects themselves to discover new meanings within the blanks. Corita famously had us make "finders" by cutting rectangles in scraps of heavy paper. She coached us on using the finders for "slow looking," focusing on a portion of a whole without being overly distracted by content. (20)
*
Her research, fueled by her insatiable curiosity and chronic insomnia, became an open invitation to pause, reflect, intercon-nect, and see art-making as important and socially valuable. Five decades after the rules were first conceived, they remain a timely guide. With huge amounts of data at our fingertips today, we can try—perhaps more readily than ever—to pull everything out of our teachers, our mentors, and each other. It's still a big ask. The good news? As Corita reminded us, there will be new rules next week. (33)
*
Corita's students chose to follow her even when she assigned hundreds of drawings for homework. These assignments pushed them through the process to teach them discipline and, if they wanted to complete the drawings, to resist perfection—something with the power to halt production altogether. Corita called them to reach, beyond their toil, to a greater discipline.
Corita's discipline was love for the world and she disciplined herself to express it through art. […] to be disciplined is to follow in a good way-developing the craft and work ethic required to create. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way— finding the greater purpose that animates an artist to endure the hard work of creating. What's your discipline? (47)
*
All must belong. It can be referred to as
"yes, and." Corita worked on not separating things. Art and life: yes, and! Win and fail: yes, and! There are, indeed, no mistakes when dichotomies are out the window.
Of course, much discouragement can arise when so much needs to be reconsidered, rethought, and remade. This may be why Corita taught her students many techniques to develop and trust their senses. We know now this is an effective way to regulate our emotions and be present in the moment, despite anxiety. Unease and creativity: yes, and! Through exercises of visual and auditory observation, she taught young artists to be in the world, not separate from it. When your homework is to pay attention to all you can hear—in your immediate vicinity, then far off, then as far as you possibly can—you are quickly reminded in a visceral way that the world, as unstable as it might be, is an endlessly rich source. When you are taught to observe a space (a gas station, of all places) for four hours through a little hole cut in a piece of paper, you see for yourself that anything can be a starting point. And the good news is that one can start in the middle. In the here and now. Through mundane little steps. In Corita's words, "doing and making are acts of hope." Tragedy would be to never start at all.
*
Rule 9:
Be happy whenever you can manage it.
Enjoy yourself.
It's lighter than you think.
Sometimes the worst experiences can be met as challenges or opportunities that drive us toward self-examination and real change. Nature, beginning with our own bodies, is in a constant state of flux and seasonality. Illness and loss brought me closer to mortality, and a rapid succession of X quantities fol-lowed, including working with the full color spectrum, gesture, and the natural world. After all, time and tide wait for no one. Art remains an expression of our own humanity and provides us with important release and learning.
The rules themselves remain a personal touchstone for me. Leaving room for X quantities (Rule 10) might even include leaving space for happiness and enjoyment (Rule 9), which is especially important for "the people who do all of the work all the time" (Rule 7). Looking through the lens of time and experience, I feel as though the complexity of the rules is also a window into Corita's world as an artist and teacher, beginning with her name. Sister Mary Corita became Corita Kent, with whole new sequences of X quantities to be discovered in secular life, moving from Los Angeles to Boston, painting and learning. (80)
April 25, 2023
New Rules Next Week: Corita Kent's Legacy Through the Eyes of Twenty Artists and Writers, edited and with an introduction by the Corita Art Center, is both a tribute to the memory of Kent as well as an inspiring work for anyone who thinks creatively (which includes everyone from artists to engineers).
If you grew up in the late 60s and early 70s as I did there is a very good chance you know of Corita Kent. You almost certainly know of her work. In the silk-screening unit of my 8th grade print class, the teacher taught not just the techniques but a little about the history and practitioners, and that was the first time I put her name with some of the images I was already familiar with.
This book offers an essay and a piece of artwork for each rule. The essays give the reader some perspective on what the rules mean, or could mean. Part of the entire purpose of the rules was flexibility, so to claim a definitive way to understand each seems to go against the intent. As long as the spirit of the rules are kept in mind, the rules offer ways to enhance and fulfill whatever roles you may have in your life. The artwork, for me, was more like taking a time trip, they mostly resembled things you would have seen during that time.
I recommend this for not just those who place creativity front and center in their work (artists, writers, etc) but also those who need to look at things from creative perspectives in order to solve problems (engineers, scientists, etc). Make them yours, adjust them to fit your situation, but keep the spirit of them alive in doing so.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
If you grew up in the late 60s and early 70s as I did there is a very good chance you know of Corita Kent. You almost certainly know of her work. In the silk-screening unit of my 8th grade print class, the teacher taught not just the techniques but a little about the history and practitioners, and that was the first time I put her name with some of the images I was already familiar with.
This book offers an essay and a piece of artwork for each rule. The essays give the reader some perspective on what the rules mean, or could mean. Part of the entire purpose of the rules was flexibility, so to claim a definitive way to understand each seems to go against the intent. As long as the spirit of the rules are kept in mind, the rules offer ways to enhance and fulfill whatever roles you may have in your life. The artwork, for me, was more like taking a time trip, they mostly resembled things you would have seen during that time.
I recommend this for not just those who place creativity front and center in their work (artists, writers, etc) but also those who need to look at things from creative perspectives in order to solve problems (engineers, scientists, etc). Make them yours, adjust them to fit your situation, but keep the spirit of them alive in doing so.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
May 20, 2026
"I aim to inspire students to find joy in their creative practice and learning, whatever that may look like. Today, our world puts immense pressure on artists and creatives to constantly create, post, and grind. When we aren't creating art, hustle culture forces us to continually think about creating and makes us feel inefficient when we aren't producing as much as our peers. Ahead of their time, Corita's rules create room for us to pause, reflect, be playful, and rediscover the joy of creating. The Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules directly contradict the very nature of our fast-paced, capitalistic, tech-oriented world. These radical rules encourage us to be present."
found at the central library in san antonio while on home + away residence with artpace
this was the solace i needed, to go at my own pace as an artist and in my endeavors away from mi casita y la normalidad de la vida
found at the central library in san antonio while on home + away residence with artpace
this was the solace i needed, to go at my own pace as an artist and in my endeavors away from mi casita y la normalidad de la vida
December 24, 2022
NetGalley had this available to read before the publication date. I've been a fan of Sister Corita Kent for years. Hearing from past students/colleagues who knew her or were inspired by her work/teaching was a delight. The paintings in the book are lovely. Highly recommended for writers and artists. I think it would a perfect graduation gift. I want to buy a paper copy when the book comes out. Thanks NetGalley and Chronicle books!
September 19, 2024
Pretty plain visually but the rules are a treat.
Read
January 26, 2025i wanna be an educator so bad… <3
i wanna be an artist too and i already am one!
thanks Mom for the christmas present
i wanna be an artist too and i already am one!
thanks Mom for the christmas present
April 24, 2025
Lovely, but so short!
April 29, 2026
Read it for the rules (not necessarily for the mini-essays)!
January 11, 2024
Lovely tribute to Corita Kent. Makes me want to learn all I can about her.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews