Mary Lum: The Moving Parts (&)

For this newly commissioned exhibition, Mary Lum has created an artist’s book and installation featuring photographs of temporary constructions made from a palette of broken vintage letterforms. The small constructions carry ideas about language coming into being and piling up on itself. Fragments are rearranged in attempts to communicate, to form something whole and understandable, against backgrounds of varying colors. Lum’s photographs, letterforms, and artist’s book appear with a selection of sketchbooks that present the artist’s mode of working through collage. All are surrounded by a large-scale paint work that envelops the gallery, the bars of color echoing the Corita Papers that inspired Lum’s publication Moving Parts (&).

Invited to work at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, with the form of language and archives as a prompt, Lum spent weeks reading and photographing the Corita Kent collection. Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita, was a Pop artist who taught at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. She was a member of the religious order Immaculate Heart of Mary for more than 30 years and was well known for silk screen prints and exuberant imagery that incorporated advertising slogans, biblical verses, and social justice messages. Kent was also known for her revolutionary use of texts by chopping them into pieces, printing them backward or upside down, and projecting words onto three-dimensional objects. She left the order in 1968 and moved to Boston, where she lived a secular life while remaining active in artmaking and social causes until her death, in 1986.