Sasha Carrera

Ed.M. AIE '00

Alexandra "Sasha" Carrera served first as education coordinator for three years and then as acting director of the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles for a year before it became apparent to everyone involved that she was both of these things and more. She had immersed herself in the inspiring work and interesting life story of the woman for whom the center was named--graphic artist Frances Elizabeth Kent, who became known as Sister Mary Corita after her inception into the Order of the Immaculate Heart Community of Mary (IHM) in LA at age 18--and she had created "an educational program to continue Corita's tradition of teaching," she says. So it's safe to say, retroactively anyway, that Sasha has been the unmitigated director of the Corita Art Center for three years now.

"Corita was director of the art department at Immaculate Heart College until 1968, when she left for Boston," Sasha explains. "My first projects were outreach programs for schools--and one such program led me to curate a retrospective of Corita's art for the Claremont School of Theology Library."

As anyone who's lived in Boston for a while may have heard, the name Corita is synonymous with the controversial decoration of the gas tanks near UMass/Boston and the JFK Library--especially the one said to depict the abstracted profile of Ho Chi Minh. In reality, Corita contributed more visual artwork of the two- than the three-dimensional kind, for three prolific decades silk-screening a great variety of anti-war and pro-social justice posters in the spirit of the peace movement and the style of the Pop Art trend. "Corita designed 800 screens," says Sasha. "At the start, she'd make as few as 20 or 30  from each screen. Later in her career, she'd make up to 200. The Corita Art Center has prints from 600 of her designs."

It's no surprise, given Sasha's work experiences and HGSE degree, that the directors of the Immaculate Heart Community found her qualified for the job of representing an artist of strong social concerns in the first place. Two years before coming to the Ed School, she toured with the National Children's Theater for the Environment, doing musical theater in schools all over the Northeast. Seeing the huge discrepancies among schools prompted Sasha to go to law school to equalize public education. So she studied for one eye-opening year at Boston College Law School, working with young offenders in the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project. "The law was clearly not for me, but that job made me realize that I wanted to work more in education than in law," she says. Before attending HGSE, though, she flirted with her interest in publishing and literature, interning for a term at David Godine Publishing in Boston. "My favorite project at Godine," she remembers, "was Stone and Steel," an anthology of poetry about the bridges of Manhattan, with paintings by Bascove, a painter and illustrator known for her intricate and colorful treatment of domestic settings and cityscapes.

With all of these interests to her credit, Sasha came to the AIE Program in 1999 "to bring them all together," she says, "and to see what single good purpose or series of purposes I could make of them." She was enrolled at HGSE for two years, actually, as a part-timer. Over those two years, she took the required courses in the arts in education then taught by founding former director Jessica Davis, and she wrote about "the epistemology of drama" for an independent study with Catherine Elgin. Going to school part-time allowed her to continue working as an actor. "I was in Neil Simon's Rumors at the Worcester Foothills Theater one season," she recalls. And she did some part-time assistant editorial work with the MIT Technology Review during her residence in Cambridge as well.

As director of the Corita Art Center, Sasha can no longer leave the office to do outreach programs in the schools, so she has shifted the educational focus to professional development instead. "California is attempting to include sequential arts learning for all grades by 2012, and the Corita Art Center's Arts Integration Teacher Training program was developed to empower classroom teachers to create their own integrated lessons that meet the VAPA" (visual and performing arts standards) "as well as the content standards they are required to satisfy," she explains. Toward similar ends, Sasha has created a curriculum, based on Corita's work, that combines the language arts and visual arts.

So the educational aspect of her job has been challenging. But it was in her curatorial capacity at the Corita Art Center that Sasha returned to Cambridge recently.

"The Corita Art Center is the collection of art and archival material that Corita bequeathed to the Immaculate Heart Community," she explains. "The estate included anything she hadn't already sold at the time of her death in 1986--and part of my job is to see that the work in our collection circulates." And it has been circulating more than usual lately--possibly because of the renewed interest that the Iraq war has inspired in anti-war art. She recently completed work on a traveling, 50-piece, retrospective exhibition of Corita's prints that follows her career, in Sasha's own words, "from her neo-gothic, overtly religious work, through her lighter Pop period, then her day-glo, politically topical period, and finally to the softer, floral, pacifist period that took up the last decade of her life." Sasha also has helped galleries in London and New York (the Leo Castelli Gallery, for instance) add Corita's work to their collections, and notes that Vanity Fair magazine's March issue will include an article about Corita.

In November, Sasha managed to come see the six Corita prints from 1969 that are part of the exhibition Dissent! –--"a historical survey of printed images" by everyone from Goya and Daumier to Richard Serra and Andy Warhol, at Harvard's Fogg Museum of Art from November 11, 2006, through February 25, 2007. This exhibition includes prints "that express resistance to religious, political, and social systems and, in doing so, demonstrate the role of printmaking in the dissemination of dissonant opinions," according to curator Susan Dackerman's caption text.

Contributing to the colorful and politically challenging American art scene most influentially in the late 60s, Corita combined text and image in ways made more powerful and provocative for their bold simplicity and charming composition. More often than not, she conveyed in her pictures a boldly hopeful message, without intellectual irony or self-righteous condemnation, about the better angels of humanity. Simply put, she seems to have worked from the self-sacrificing premises of Jesus' proverbs and sermons.

"She really did think we could change things for the better," says Sasha. "She wasn't interested in critiquing culture from a safe distance but in changing it within."

As opposed to imperialist US foreign policy as much as she was to domestic inequality of opportunity, Corita in her life and work raised conscientious objections to the aggressive status quo. She suggested turning the other cheek, in other words, loving one's neighbors as oneself, and refraining from throwing the first stone--precepts that many influential religious leaders are still loathe to adopt. It's radical Christian fundamentalism of a different sort--and it can be seen in the six posters at the Fogg.

In one compelling poster at the Fogg, Corita juxtaposes a Newsweek cover of helmeted US soldiers arresting a Viet Cong soldier with a handwritten passage of Walt Whitman's poetry ("I am the hounded slave," it begins with characteristic empathy) in one corner of the page, an 1803 blueprint of a slave ship's galley next to that, and a smaller news photo of US soldiers carrying one of their own injured off the battlefield in the other corner--a juxtaposition that suggests a single source for both foreign and domestic manifestations of American racism. Another print shows the relaxed and smiling face of 1968 Democratic presidential hopeful Eugene McCarthy in mustard-yellow tones beneath the red-lettered and typographically scrambled phrase "a breath of fresh air" on the same mustard-yellow background, with a cursive encomium to McCarthy's humanitarian faith in good government scribbled into the lower-right-hand corner. Yet another poster declares, in black capital letters, that BLACK IS BEAUTIF/UL above the red capital letters of a text that appears to display the red term CRUCIFIXION, the blue term REDEMPTION, and the black term (again) RESURRECTION OF/THE SPIRIT, all of it on a hot pink background, until a closer look reveals that the words in capital letters are part of a longer passage from the Coretta Scott King eulogy for her husband that begins, in cursive, "I challenge you today to see that his spirit never dies." Below that are Coretta's famous profile, mourning veil and all, and a passage from the liberated, Zen-inspired prose of philosopher Alan Watts--all very typical of the 60s, one might say, as valuable as time capsules from an era of American cultural renaissance as they are as examples of great aesthetic design.  

One particularly evocative anti-war poster from Corita's most politically charged period--one not in the Fogg exhibition--features the words "Stop the Bombing," in navy-blue letters, in mid-wave as if blown by the wind--but they aren't printed on a flag, just on the air, with a nice ripple in the p of "Stop" and the m of "Bombing," against a white sky over a blue horizon and a red, perhaps blood-soaked foreground. Another one, titled for Eleanor, also playing on the colors of the American flag and the distortion of images on it as the wind ruffles it into action, features a large blue cursive capital G against an irregular design of red and white horizontal stripes, almost like the chord G denoted on a musical score, with, in black letters, the simple, incomplete statement, THE BIG STANDS FOR GOODN –the g left out for us to fill in, the "ess" of GOODNESS too--as hopeful an appeal to the light-hearted part of American character as there could be, perhaps especially so given the appropriated source of this motto in the advertisements of cereal manufacturer General Mills. Still another poster with flag connotations and an appropriation of publicly disseminated language, For Emergency Use Soft Shoulder, bends the blue words GET WITH THE ACTION around two invisible vertical folds, with the mustard-colored words WINE THAT REJOYCES MAN'S HEAR[the missing T is silently assumed] upside down in the same space--with the scrawled terms (borrowed from another commercial slogan) "powerful enough to make a difference" in white on a red background at the bottom.

After some of the turbulence of the 1960s, Corita's work, like that of many artists, took a turn toward the less topical and more broadly inspirational. Thanks to her residence in Boston from 1968 (she moved here from the order on a sabbatical but never returned) until her death in 1986, about a dozen of her later prints found their way onto the walls of HGSE's own Gutman Library, in the newly renovated second floor study area. Softly abstracted garden flowers flourish in some of these beautiful pieces from Corita's last years--and while there is still a good deal of text, it tends to be from passages of quietly subversive poetry rather than from forceful political writings. According to HGSE librarian John Collins, "The Corita prints actually came to us only a few years ago. They were a gift from HGSE alums Alicia Savage, Ed.M.'99, and her late aunt, Joan Aliberti, Ed.M.'77, to the Gutman Library 'for the enjoyment and pleasure of current and future HGSE faculty, students and staff'.We're proud of them, especially now that they're being shown to best effect on the second floor."

When Sasha came to Cambridge in November, she had no fewer than six Corita-related engagements in two days. In the morning of Monday the 13th, she met with Susan Dackerman at the Fogg Museum, and then with Mary Anne Karia, a longtime friend of Corita whose mother, Eleanor Mikulka, lent the prints for the Fogg display. She dropped by the Schlesinger Library in Radcliffe Yard to see the legacy of papers, letters, and clippings that visitors are welcome to peruse, and then she met Corita's old friend, Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox, for tea. In the afternoon, she gave a walking-and-talking tour of the Dissent! show to a group of HGSE Arts in Education students. (Next to works by likes of Andy Warhol, Edouard Manet, Ben Shahn, Jenny Holzer, and Honoré Daumier, Corita's did not at all pale, either.) That evening, Sasha attended a staged reading of Little Heart, a biographical play about Corita by Irene O'Garden, at the Loeb Drama Center.

For a couple of days at least, it was all Corita, all the time, and anyone who came into contact with Alexandra "Sasha" Carrera during those two days was likely to learn more about Corita's life, both personal and professional, than s/he had previously known.

DISSENT!
November 11, 2006 through February 25, 2007
At The Fogg Art Museum