Flora
St. Kate's is known for its beautiful flower gardens and for the great care they take in nurturing the growth of the plants. Along with caring for the flowers, St. Kates is also a place that encourages and inspires students to bloom is a rich environment. These flowers, just like the students shape our campus into a beautful masterpiece.
This page includes floral art pieces by Clara Mairs, Cecilla Lieder and Corita Kent.
Flowers can represent many things; they can simply show hope, joy and springtime or they can mean mourning. They can be the centerpiece of an artwork or just a side note tucked into the piece.
Cecilia Lieder, a 1964 College of St. Catherine graduate, is a Minnesota-born printmaker from Minneapolis who has been working for over 35 years, creating beautiful original woodcuts and stone lithographs. Her work has been shown in the Boston area, where she spent 10 years working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lieder now lives in Duluth, Minnesota. Using a combination of Western and Eastern printing methods, Lieder creates scenes of natural settings, translating the growth and beauty of the world around her. She uses layers of bright colors to create a brilliant glowing effect, allowing her images to jump off the page. While Lieder's prints are realistic, they have a level of transcendence to them. "I am looking for truth through a keenly focused observation of the natural world around me" (Cecilia Lieder). Artist biography courtesy of the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery.
Clara Mairs, a Minnesota artist born in Hastings, MN in 1878 and a resident of St. Paul, MN at the time of her death in 1963, studied art at the Saint Paul Institute. She also studied abroad in Paris and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. While in Paris, she studied at the Academie Julian, the Academie Colarossi with E. A. Bourdelle, and at the Academie Montparnasse with Andre Lhote. Mairs, best known for her etchings, created an extensive body of work including prints, paintings, ceramics, and textiles. Her work routinely depicts women, children, animals, circus performers, and stories from the Old Testament, frequently with a hint of humor or satire. Mairs, an award winning print artist, has been exhibited in the United States and in Europe. Work Cited-Clara: Etchings by Clara Mairs. St. Paul: Minnesota Museum of Art, 1976.
Corita Kent was born Frances Kent in 1918 in Fort Dodge, Iowa and grew up in Los Angeles, California. She later joined the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 and took the name Sister Mary Corita. She graduated from Immaculate Heart College in 1941 and then taught grade school in British Columbia. In 1946 she returned to Immaculate Heart College to teach art. In 1951, she received a master’s degree in art history from the University of Southern California. Corita’s art gained fame in the 1960s and reflected her spirituality and commitment to social justice. As the head of the art department of Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, she taught students to find art in everyday life, as well as everyday objects. In 1967 her works were displayed in over 150 shows in the Unites States alone. She left the order in 1968 and continued to create work.