About the Exhibitions:
ICA is pleased to present Tim Rollins and K.O.S. the first major museum retrospective of work by artist, activist, and teacher Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), a group of artists originally made up of Rollins’s students from Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx. Rollins and his students are known for their large, minimalist works of art created on the pages of books cut out and laid in a grid on canvas. Together, they’ve developed a collaborative strategy that combines lessons in reading and writing with the production of works of art.
Rollins and K.O.S. have produced paintings, prints, photographs,
and sculpture based on literary texts such as Franz Kafka's
Amerika, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl, William Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream, and musical scores, including Winterreise
by Franz Schubert. On view in ICA's second floor gallery,
the exhibition will include over 20 works created between
1984 and 2000. The Emmy-award-winning documentary film on
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. will screen continuously in the mezzanine.
In August 1981, Tim Rollins, then twenty-six years old, was
recruited by George Gallego, principal of Intermediate School
52 in the South Bronx, to develop a curriculum that incorporated
art-making with reading and writing lessons for students who
had been classified as academically or emotionally "at
risk." Rollins told his students on that first day, "Today
we are going to make art, but we are also going to make history."
The collaboration between Rollins and his students soon outgrew
the classroom. Frustrated with the strictures of the public
school system, Rollins opened the Art and Knowledge Workshop,
an after-school program in an abandoned school building five
blocks from IS52. After teaching all day at IS52, Rollins
would meet K.O.S. members at the workshop; homework would
be done and art would be made.
In 1987, Rollins and K.O.S. began using a traveling workshop format to spread the ideas and inspiration behind their project beyond the South Bronx. In 1994, Rollins and K.O.S. moved their operation to a studio in Chelsea. There Rollins and some long-term K.O.S. members rebuilt and expanded the project nationally and internationally, significantly increasing the number of workshops conducted with other schools and arts institutions. Today there are active K.O.S. members in Philadelphia, Memphis, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York.
Rollins and K.O.S.'s decision to exhibit the art that they
had created in their classroom in professional galleries marked
an important turning point in their history; it signaled the
moment they began to distinguish themselves from other teacher-student
collaborations and demanded that their work be engaged first
as fine art. Between the mid-1980s and early-1990s, Rollins
and K.O.S. participated in two Whitney Biennials (1985, 1991)
Documenta (1987), the Venice Biennale (1988), the Carnegie
International (1988) and had solo shows at institutions such
as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1988); Museum für
Gegenwärtskunst Basel, Switzerland (1990); Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1990); and the Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1992).
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. is curated by Ian Berry, Malloy Curator of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in collaboration with the artists, and is coordinated at the ICA by Kate Kraczon, Assistant Curator. This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.
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