Corita Kent, enriched bread, 1965, serigraph, image courtesy of Corita Art Center, Los Angeles, corita.org
In 1962, Sister Corita Kent attended an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. By 1962, Corita was implementing consumer product imagery with the creation of wonderbread, which consisted of red, yellow, and blue polka dots that mimicked the bread company’s packaging design. By appropriating familiar promotional culture and advertising, Corita was able to expand her spiritual and social messages to a larger contemporary audience.
enriched bread is a 1965 print that includes the same imagery in wonderbread, a motif seen multiple times throughout Corita’s work of the 1960s. While Coritas never explicitly explained the meaning behind this iconic imagery, artist and critic Joel Kuennnen, speculates that it may symbolize the traditional Catholic belief of transubstantiation. This concept relates to the transformation of the Eucharist into the Body of Christ during a Catholic Mass. When viewing enriched bread, one may relate the transformation of the Eucharist with the transformation of appropriated advertisements and slogans into an entirely new meaning. Corita’s use of this iconography solidified her role within the American pop art movement.
-Nathan Howard ‘25