Tim Rollins & K.O.S
1955 (Pittsfield , U S A ) – 2017 (New York, USA)
Tim Rollins was an artist, teacher and activist. In 1979, he founded Group Material in New York. In the early 1980s, he taught ‘at risk’ youth with learning disabilities at Intermediate School 52 in the Bronx and went on to create the Art & Knowledge Workshop. His highly acclaimed collaboration with the members of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) continued for many years. Rollins combined lessons in reading and writing with making artworks. The source material laid out and studied by the students generally related to literary or musical classics, but can also include comics or legal documents. Their collaborative work took the form of drawings, photographs, sculptural objects and paintings on canvas and paper. The backgrounds of works are often comprised of pages of books pasted into a grid. The results blend elements of Minimalism with an interest in the revival of painting that took place in the 1980s and in art that is socially and politically engaged.
Rollins has said: “What we’re doing changes people’s conception about who can make art, how art is made, who can learn and what’s possible, because a lot of these kids had been written off by the school system. This is our revenge.”
(courtesy of Xavier Hufkens)
Tim Rollins died in 2017 in New York. The original K.O.S. members dispersed and now live in several different American cities. Some have gone on to become artists in their own right.
I See the Promised Land (After Dr. Martin Luther Kind Jr.) #3 1999
PINOCCHIO (after Carlo Collodi), 1992
INVISIBLE MAN (after Ralph Ellison), 2006
Letter from a Birmingham City Jail (after Rev. Dr. M.L. King, Jr.) 2006
Amerika - Everyone is Welcome ! (after Kafka) 2002
BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY (after Malcolm X), 2008
A Midsummer Night's Dream (after Mendelsohn & Shakespeare), 2009
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny - ACT II (after Weill and Brecht) 2010
Tim Rollins & K.O.S. have been involved in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennale in New York in 1985, 1991 and 2006 and Documenta in Kassel in 1987.
The group’s work is in numerous international public and private collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Tate Modern, London; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Aspen Art Museum, CO; Berkeley Art Museum, University of California Berkeley; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Dia Art Foundation, New York; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; and Dallas Museum of Art.
Tim Rollins & K.O.S are represented by the following galleries;
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