Breaking a Habit, Sister Corita, Aaron Rose, 2009 (YouTube)
Reminiscing again, thanks to Nicole again…
In the Spring of 2011, the seventh graders that Carwai and I were working with studied Sister Corita Kent for Great Artists, a six-week program in which each class immersed themselves in the life and work of an artist, and prepared for a culminating art show of student work showing their studies. There are some blog posts I made at that time pointing to Sister Corita references, including the video above. (The soundtrack brings me right back to Studio 7, the classroom we shared before we moved into Studio 8.) I have only one image of student work online, which I'll post after this.
Sister Corita's rules (also posted to this blog before) have been a mini-controversy. It's hard to say what's true, but I like to believe the following because it reminds me of our constitutions (the same crew that studies Sister Corita led the creation of that constitution the following fall):
Then in June 2012, Jill Bell quoted "Richard Crawford who was in on the creation of 'The Rules'." Crawford was a student of Sister Corita's in 1967-68, and says she gave the class the assignment to come up with a list of rules one night, and then to design and print them up. Cage's quote was contributed by one of the students.
Regardless of what is true, I'm going to stick with Sister Corita as the source because (1) it doesn't make sense to me for Cage to quote himself within rules he created, and (2) because while I love John Cage, I think I love Sister Corita more, especially thanks to my memories of seventh graders exploring and emulating her work.
This isn't the first time that I've written about my time at TCS. There is more to be found amongst the posts collected here. If you're interested, maybe "Zealots, enthusiasm, understanding, stupidity, and progressive education" is a good start, considering all that I've just said.
Update: I found something else online to offer a look into Studio 7 and a glimpse of the Sister Corita work.
Update II: See also the Baylis Gascock's 25-minute documentary about Sister Corita: We Have No Art while it lasts on YouTube.