After a cancer diagnosis in the early 1970s, she entered an extremely prolific period in her career, including the Rainbow Swash design on the LNG storage tank in Boston, and the 1985 version of the United States Postal Service's special Love stamp.

Critics and theorists previously failed to count her work as part of any mainstream "canon," but in the last few years there has been a resurgence of attention given to Kent.

In junior high, Corita and her siblings attended Blessed Sacrament School which was partially staffed by Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

[1] Her classes at Immaculate Heart were an avant-garde mecca for prominent, ground-breaking artists and inventors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Cage, Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and Charles & Ray Eames.

[10] Kent credited Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller, and art historian Dr. Alois Schardt for their important roles in her intellectual and artistic growth.

[11] By the early 1950s, she had such a unique and well-known aesthetic and teaching style that clergy members from all over the country were sent to be educated at Immaculate Heart College.

After the Second Vatican Council, Kent transformed Immaculate Heart College's annual Mary's Day procession into a community celebration which was part of the sister's campaign to bring secular people together.

[1] Her 1951 print, The Lord is with Thee had won first prizes in printmaking at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, Art, and at the California State Fair.

After this diagnosis, in the Back Bay of Boston, Kent confined her art to water color painting and only pursued printmaking in order to say something substantiative.

This displayed that Kent, in the midst of fighting cancer, followed a strict diet, answered and wrote letters, and wanted to live and continue to create art.

Her design process involved appropriating an original advertising graphic to suit her idea; for example, she would tear, rip, or crumple the image, then re-photograph it.

She often used grocery store signage, texts from scripture, newspaper clippings, song lyrics, and writings from literary greats such as Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Albert Camus as the textual focal point of her work.

She quotes him in her work separately more than a dozen times and was inspired by a line from one of his lectures to create an entire series of alphabet prints.

"Like a priest, a shaman, a magician, she could pass her hands over the commonest of the everyday, the superficial, the oh-so-ordinary, and make it a vehicle of the luminous, the only, and the hope filled," noted Corita's friend, theologian Harvey Cox.

Her style is heavily text-based, with scripture passages or positive quotes often encompassing entire compositions with bold and highly saturated typefaces.

[1] For example, her silkscreen print, stop the bombing (1967) is a large piece protesting the use of nuclear weaponry in bold, blue letters against a white and red background.

[24] The "Big G" logo that Kent appropriated from General Mills was to stress the idea of 'goodness', while the elements from Esso gasoline ads were meant to project the internal power within humans.

[27] Her collages took popular images, often with twisted or reversed words, to comment on the political unrest of the period, many of which could have been found at any number of marches or demonstrations, some of which she attended herself.

[33] In 2023 the Catticus Corporation was granted $700,000[34] by the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce a documentary, titled "You Should Never Blink", about the rebellious life of the “pop art nun” Corita Kent.