I first learned about artist Corita Kent in 2021 when I heard a radio news headline about the city of Los Angeles granting an historical landmark status to her art studio. A campaign launched by her fans had prevented the building from being turned into a parking lot. Researching who she was, I discovered that I had driven by her largest piece, known as “The Rainbow Swash,” painted on a 140-foot gas tank in Boston. I had always loved it, marveling at its rich colors, rough jagged lines, and very large size.

Love Is Hard Work: The Art and Heart of Corita Kent is a comprehensive dive into the life, work, devotion, protest, and art of Sister Mary Corita, later known as Corita Kent. Illustrator Victoria Tentler-Krylov has chosen to maximize her space, using double-page spreads throughout the book celebrating, illuminating, documenting, and illustrating the scenes from Sister Corita's life, chosen by author Dan Paley, in careful detail. Beautiful soft, rich watercolor is the medium of choice.

This is a very busy book — which is a good choice in this case: Sister Corita’s mind, heart, soul, and psyche were constantly energized and active. She was tireless in her love for creating art. She was passionate about looking at advertising art from every angle and using messaging to bring about change. She deeply loved humanity and believed that with love and hope and hard work, she and other like-minded artists and activists could help shape our world into one of peace, equality, and justice. She was a brilliant teacher who guided her pupils to learn to create art as an expression of love and excellence. 

Packing all this into the few pages of a picture book is certainly not an easy task. Tentler-Krylov strikes the right balance in the illustrations to keep readers interested but not overwhelmed. Some spreads are filled with large block letters marching around pages — protest signs, spelling the messages of love, hope, questions, and challenge that Sister Corita constantly set before the world — see the book cover to get an idea if you haven’t seen the book yet.

Other spreads show her students experimenting, creating, marching — always encouraged by Sister Corita’s vision of each person learning their unique way of seeing everything, large and small, and expressing it on paper. There are pages with big activity such as protesters carrying signs while balloons and confetti fill the air. There are several pages showing the people of Los Angeles going about their day in a crowded, sign-filled city. These same pages also include tiny details to pore over and appreciate.

A favorite spread is the classroom/art studio scene where the ten rules for creating art that Sister Corita and her students developed are marched around the room by students on posters like protest signs. In another classroom scene, her famous artist guidelines and instructions hang from banners on the ceiling.

Several pages focus on the burgeoning advertising and billboards and crowded chaos of 1950s Los Angeles as sign-filled streets and stores loom large over crowds of people and cars. Sister Corita shows her students how to use finders to focus in details and new perspectives on the signage. We get to peek through one finder and see just a few letters suddenly emphasized into powerful words. Display windows in department stores are filled with boxes from floor to ceiling calling us to “Peace, peace, peace” painted on hundreds of brightly colored boxes, while black-and-white newspaper articles about the Vietnam War splattered around the page remind us of her focus at that time.

Demonstrating her vision of protest of hunger and poverty, another double-page spread shows us how Sister Corita took the design of Wonder Bread packaging to an entirely different place. The famous blue, red, and yellow packaging is cut up into long rectangles and the loaves of bread into communion wafers.

A few pages later, we see a different side of her strength. The resistance and just plain sass in the face and body language of Sister Corita and her fellow nuns and teachers, when the well-known conservative Cardinal of Los Angeles pushed back against their work, is also a delight.

One of the lushest and gentlest spreads of the book comes on the following pages as Corita, now retired from the nunhood and living in Boston, rests and paints bright yellow and orange flowers and greenery in a large garden. Now unrestrained by her vows and teaching work in Los Angeles, her love and passion for encouraging social change and moving toward a peaceful and just world continued to flourish over the next eighteen years.

To illustrate the life of a master artist, whose life work was focused on nurturing artists and inspiring social change and social justice through art, is not a simple undertaking. But Tentler-Krylov has done so in this beautiful book.

As the Caldecott rules say, the excellence should be as follows: excellence of execution in the artistic style employed (check), excellence of pictorial interpretation of story, theme, or concept (check), appropriateness of style of illustration to the story, theme or concept (check). There are more, but you get the idea. Will the Caldecott Committee appreciate the complexity and brilliance of this illustration work? I hope so.

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of Love Is Hard Work]