EARTH ~

Dorothy Day on her chair-cane, in calm conversation with armed police just before her arrest picketing with striking farm workers
photo: Bob Fitch, 1971


I first met Dorothy Day a few days before Christmas in 1960 while on leave from the U.S. Navy After reading copies of The Catholic Worker that I had found in my parish library, and then reading Dorothy's autobiography, The Long Loneliness, I decided to visit the community she had founded. I was based not so far away in Washington D.C.


Arriving in Manhattan for that first visit, I made my way to Saint Joseph's House — then in a loft on Spring Street, on the north edge of Little Italy in the Lower East Side of New York City. Discovering that it was moving day, I joined in helping carry boxes from an upstairs loft to a three-storey brick building at 175 Chrystie Street, a few blocks to the east. Jack Baker, one of the other people assisting with the move that day, invited me to stay in his apartment in the same neighborhood.




Rita Corbin's artwork


A few days later I visited the community's rural outpost on Staten Island, the Peter Maurin Farm. Crossing Upper New York Harbor by ferry, I made my way to an old farmhouse on a rural road just north of Pleasant Plains near the island's southern tip. In its large, faded dining room, I found half-a-dozen people, Dorothy among them, gathered around a pot of tea at one end of the dining room table.


At the time, Dorothy was only sixty-three, though to my young eyes she seemed old enough to have known Abraham and Sarah. But what a handsome woman! Her face was long, with high, prominent cheekbones underlining large, quick eyes, deep blue and almond shaped, that could be teasing one moment, laughing the next, then turn grave an instant later. Her gray hair, parted in the middle, was braided and circled the back of her head like a garland of silver flowers. She had a fresh, scrubbed look with no trace of cosmetics. The woolen suit she wore was plain but well-tailored and good quality. (I only recently learned from her goddaughter, Johannah Hughes Turner, that her suit was probably a gift from her sister, Della Spier. "Dorothy was tall and hard to fit," Johannah told me. "Rarely did she find anything in the Catholic Worker clothing room that she could use. Della enjoyed dressing Dorothy and could afford to provide her with solid, classic suits and dresses.")




Thomas Merton
photo: Ralph Eugene Meatyard


I gave Dorothy a bag of letters addressed to her that had been received in Manhattan. Within minutes, she was reading the letters aloud to all of us.


The only letter I still recall from that day's reading was from Thomas Merton, the famous monk whose autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, had held many people in its grip, including me. In 1941, Merton had withdrawn from "the world" to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky with a slam of the door that eventually was heard around the world. I had assumed that he wrote to no one outside his family. Yet here he was in correspondence with someone who was not only in the thick of the world, but one of its more engaged and controversial figures.






In his letter, Merton told Dorothy that he was deeply touched by her witness for peace, which in recent years had five times resulkted in her arrest and imprisonment for refusing to take shleter during civil defense drills. "You are right going along the lines of satyagraha [Gandhi's term for nonviolent action]. I see no other way. . . .Nowadays it is no longer a question of who is right but who is at least not criminal. . . .It has never been more true than now that the world is lost in its own falsity and cannot see true values. . . .God bless you." Ten months later, Merton published an essay in The Catholic Worker — "The Root of War Is Fear" — and immediately got into trouble with his religious superiors and others both inside and outside the monastery.




Cesar Chavez, Coretta King & Dorothy Day


Merton was one of countless people drawn to Dorothy and influenced by her. She had a great gift for making those who met her, even if only through letters or her published writings, look at themselves in a new light, questioning previously held ideas, allegiances and choices.


I was another of those whose life took an unexpected turn thanks to Dorothy Day. Five months after that first encounter, I was granted an early discharge from the Navy on grounds of conscientious objection. At Dorothy's invitation, I became part of the staff at Saint Joseph's House in New York.

from ALL IS GRACE
a biography of Dorothy Day
by Jim Forest
Orbis Books
www.orbisbooks.com

Jim Forest, activist

CATHOLIC WORKER ~

Rita Corbin

Over many decades the art work of Rita Corbin always drew my eye, whether in The Catholic Worker publications, or other venues. Her woodcuts were stunning pieces — bold and enduring impressions with elegant movement. Some years running we would order RC's holiday cards with many of the woodcuts or other designs, and always very reasonably charged and packed as if personally to us. One woodcut of a woodcutter working in snow caught my fancy and instead of calling Rita Corbin in Putney, Vermont where she was then living, Sweetheart went on a drive to meet and visit with Rita to ask permission to use her woodcut on one of my books. She took five year old Carson with her so it was some time ago. Rita was living in a trailer with cats and children and the visit all fell together nicely, Sweetheart came home with Rita's woodcut in hand. It was reproduced on the book below and published by Mad River Press. We will all miss her.

cover art by Rita Corbin



Rita Corbin, Catholic Worker artist, dies at 81

Artist Rita Corbin, whose tender line drawings graced the pages of Catholic Worker journals for decades, died Nov. 17 from injuries suffered in a car crash. She was 81.

Corbin decided early in life to become an artist, choosing to major in art while attending Cathedral High School in New York City.

"The school was keen on turning out secretaries," she said, "but I refused to learn to type. I knew I didn't want to go into business on pure instinct, I guess. I needed a major and art appealed to me the most."

For Corbin, the artistic endeavor could not be separated from one's political and religious consciousness. She considered the work of the artist to be "a real struggle to bring some kind of form and feeling out of the materials one uses and the society one lives in."

Corbin's society included the natural world as well as the poor. Both were frequent subjects of her illustrations. Her etchings and pen and ink drawings of trees, flowers and birds have been described as lyrical celebrations of nature. Her figurative work has been likened to that of German painter, printer and sculptor Kathe Kollwitz.

Unassuming in demeanor, Corbin was a prolific artist. Over the course of her life, she produced a voluminous and expansive body of work that explored a variety of styles and subject matter. Much of this art was created while Corbin was living in pacifist collectives and raising children. She donated a lot of her work and later said, "In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have given away so much to people who could pay for it. It's not fair to other artists for me to work entirely for free."

Her artwork enjoyed wide-ranging publication. Corbin's images appeared in Commonweal, Harvard Theological Review, several pacifist magazines and numerous Catholic and liturgical publications. She illustrated books, including Thomas Merton's Ishi Means Man, painted a mural in Chicago and annually produced Christmas cards and a calendar.

But Corbin is best known for her countless contributions to The Catholic Worker newspaper first published in New York in 1933. She, along with liturgical artist Ade Bethune and illustrator Fritz Eichenberg, formed what one editor of The Catholic Worker referred to as the "Holy Trinity" of artists whose work shaped the look and feel of the newspaper during its formative years.

Her now-famous etching contrasting the Works of War with the Works of Mercy was emblematic of the Catholic Worker movement's commitment to Christian pacifism and solidarity with the poor. It has been reproduced in Catholic Worker journals all over the country.

Editors described her as a most agreeable and responsive artist, able to produce images in a timely manner.

"If we said we needed something for the newspaper, Rita would do it. She understood the importance of the work," said Patrick Jordan, a former editor of The Catholic Worker and now managing editor of Commonweal.

Rita Corbin's famous depiction of the works of mercy, seen in Catholic Worker communities across the country.Jordan said Corbin "had a way of picturing the poor that was obvious it wasn't from afar. ... There was one picture she drew of a woman at the [Catholic Worker] soup kitchen standing beside a dining room table where someone had scrawled, 'Joy, Joy, Joy.' Rita caught that detail. For a journal that didn't use photographs, she conveyed a great deal with a certain clarity that worked very well for a newspaper."

Writer and publisher Robert Ellsberg, who edited The Catholic Worker in the late 1970s, praised Corbin's regard for the natural world.

"A lot of the famous Catholic Worker artists like Bethune and Eichenberg brought a heavy, narrative approach to the paper," he said. "Rita always brought a more celebratory and decorative approach that came out of the [Catholic Worker] farming communities. Her images from nature reflected as much of a concrete dimension of the Catholic Worker movement as those depicting the Houses of Hospitality."

Indeed, Corbin said she considered some of her best art to be her drawings of nature and the poor, "those on the fringes of society, the same kinds of people Christ came to heal and teach."

Born May 21, 1930, in Indianapolis, Corbin was the youngest daughter of Carmen and Hubert Ham. The family was very poor and traveled throughout the country while Hubert Ham, an organist, played for magic shows.

After graduating from Cathedral High School, Corbin remained in New York to pursue training in art. She was awarded a scholarship to Franklin School of Professional Art, a three-year advertising school, then later studied with Hans Hoffman, a master of abstract expressionism. She also took classes at the Arts Student League of New York City.

But Corbin said much of her artistic education came from wandering through New York's galleries and parks, simply observing.

Upon graduating from advertising school, Corbin was offered a job at an agency, which she declined. When later asked if she regretted refusing a potentially lucrative career, Corbin said, "What I do is kind of commercial, but I have control. I consider myself an artist illustrator, not a fine artist, not a commercial artist."

Corbin first visited the New York Catholic Worker on New Year's Day in 1950. Like many before her, she was immediately recruited to help in the kitchen. She made friends with the Catholic Workers and kept coming back to their home on the Lower East Side to attend Friday night meetings, bake bread, serve soup, support a strike or demonstrate against the city's civil defense drills.

"The Catholic Worker was my school, my education," she once said.

The Catholic Worker first published Corbin's art in 1954. Two years later she married Marty Corbin, a Catholic intellectual. For 10 years, the couple lived in Glen Gardner, N.J., in an intentional community founded by pacifist Dave Dellinger.

As artist and writer, the Corbins contributed to Liberation, a radical, pacifist monthly. Conditions in Glen Gardner were very tough. The Corbins lived in an un-insulated chicken coop. Their firstborn, a son, died in infancy, the first of many losses in Corbin's life. Three daughters were also born in Glen Gardner.

In the mid-'60s, the family moved to the Catholic Worker farm at Tivoli, N.Y. Marty Corbin edited The Catholic Worker. A son and another daughter were born.

After spending 10 years at Tivoli, the Corbins relocated to Montreal, where Marty taught English at a local college. Rita separated from her husband four years later, and with her children, moved back to the United States. She lived in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., then Weston, Vt., where she became art director of Growth Associates publishers, then Worcester, Mass., where she studied printmaking with artist activist Tom Lewis.

At the time of her death, Corbin was living in Brattleboro, Vt., near her five children and grandchildren.

Once asked what advice she would give to young artists, Corbin said, "Keep working at it. It doesn't come easy. It's very fulfilling. A lot of young people think in terms of jobs and not vocations. It's very schizophrenic."

~ Claire Schaeffer-Duffy

for National Catholic Reporter

Rita Corbin poses for a photo in 2008 at the 75th anniversary celebration of the Catholic Worker movement in Worcester, Mass. (Photo courtesy of Bob Fitch)

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is a longtime NCR contributor. She writes from Worcester, Mass., where she lives and works at the Ss. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker.

http://ncronline.org/news/people/rita-corbin-catholic-worker-artist-dies-81