Artist Danh Vo returns to the Nivaagaard Collection in Summer 2022 – this time to put together an exhibition of the progressive and iconic pop artist Sister Corita Kent.

The exhibition follows on the heels of last year’s collaboration with Danh Vo, who presents significant and cherished artists from his own collection at the museum. Vo owns a considerable collection of works by Sister Corita Kent, who has inspired him all throughout his artistic career. The exhibition will consist both of works from his own collection as well as pieces on loan from private collectors.

Sister Corita Kent (1918–86) was a Catholic nun, an influential pop artist and a charismatic teacher with a progressive approach both to teaching and to her artistic creation. Between 1936 and 1968, she belonged to a Catholic order in Los Angeles where she also taught and gained notoriety for her ability to engage her students. She devoted the last eighteen years of her life entirely to her art and the international exhibitions which came with it.

Her works often combine visual expressivity with literary texts, poetry or messages of peace and social justice, and in so doing they unify her spiritual relationship to God with a civic engagement and a belief in the power of art. She lived in a time of political turmoil in the USA and both as a person and an artist, she was deeply concerned by poverty, racism and war: She was an activist who organised marches and was behind the production of political signs, with an approach which was always entrenched in a hopeful and joyful belief in change. Humour and subtlety were equally able to weave their way in and imbue profound messages with an extra sharpness.

Corita Kent believed that everyone possessed a deep inner creativity which could be fostered by observing the world both with the eyes and the heart. Kent was a contemporary of pop artist Andy Warhol – and inspired by his aestheticisation of everyday life and ordinary objects: cardboard boxes, newspaper headlines, supermarkets and a crack in the pavement were all things that could be observed and used as part of a creative process. Serious observation and serious play were her method, and screen printing was her preferred medium – and one which matched her democratic mindset through its reproducibility.

Danh Vo presents – a recurring collaboration
In 2020, the Nivaagaard Collection began a multi-year collaboration with the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo, who grew up in Nivå and today has the whole world as his stage. Like the founder of the Nivaagaard Collection, Danh Vo is a great collector. Danh Vo presented his first exhibition at the Nivaagaard Collection in 2020, and last summer he broke loose from the museum and took over the town of Nivå and its surrounding countryside as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration with a chef and a researcher.

The exhibition is supported by the Obel Family Foundation.

to know more about the exhibition:
corita kent