By the People and for the People:
Tim Rollins and his
Youth Project K.O.S.
Education programs for children and young people are
currently experiencing a boom. The Deutsche
Bank Foundation is sponsoring a project
enabling pupils to encounter art free of charge at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum
in Cologne, while the Deutsche
Guggenheim has offered educational programs geared to certain age
groups from the very beginning. So it's time to take a look back. For more
than 25 years Tim Rollins has been working with school kids from New
York's South Bronx. In one of America's most extreme sites of social
discord, the artist and teacher offers kids alternatives to drugs and
crime with his collective "Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (Kids of Survival)." But
K.O.S. is more than just an ordinary social project—some of the group's
works have made it into the MoMA and the Tate. Cheryl Kaplan met
with Tim Rollins in his studio.
Tim
Rollins
photo courtesy Cheryl
Kaplan. Cheryl Kaplan, 2008.
All
rights reserved.
Sitting in a wooden rocking
chair, Tim
Rollins looks like a country preacher from another century. He speaks
with an almost Southern drawl, which is surprising because he was born in
rural Maine in 1955. In the space of a week he's been to Syracuse,
Kentucky, Harvard and back. The floor of his studio looks like hell:
papers everywhere, a bulging suitcase with an outfit from last year; a
white shirt wrapped in its dry cleaning bag rests on top of the rubble of
empty paint bottles, scraps of paper, and wires. The windows and the walls
are covered with art or remnants of art. A laptop computer juts out of a
plastic bookshelf and a photograph of K.O.S.
(Kids of Survival) peers out of another corner. It reveals a younger
Rollins with jet black hair and Chris Hernandez, an original K.O.S. member
who was shot and killed on Valentine's Day, 1993 in the South Bronx.
Tim
Rollins and K.O.S studio
photo
courtesy Cheryl Kaplan. Cheryl Kaplan, 2008.
All
rights reserved.
After twenty-six years, Tim
Rollins is still riding that line between art, education, and a rescue
operation, having started Tim Rollins and K.O.S. in the early 80s as a
collaboration with visually talented kids living in poverty and danger in
the South Bronx. K.O.S. works as both a core group of 12 members and
through a series of collaborative workshops with kids from local schools
across America. The projects created by Rollins and K.O.S. usually take
years to complete. As Rollins explains, "We first made the painting The
Red Badge of Courage in 1992 [based on Stephen
Crane's Civil War novel
about a soldier's conflict in fighting], and then, in 2008, we made a new
version of this work for the exhibition at The
Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, NY. Crane had attended the university.
We also combined this work with the sermons of Martin
Luther King, Jr."
Tim
Rollins and K.O.S., The War of the Worlds (after H.G. Wells), 2004
©Tim
Rollins and K.O.S..
Courtesy
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.
Galleria
Raucci / Santamaria, Naples.
Photo:
Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich.
Rollins and K.O.S. always include a period of discovery as part of their
process; the planning stage involves conceptual and technical research.
Rollins collaborates with the K.O.S. group through a combination of
meetings, emails, Fed-Ex deliveries, phone calls, and sometimes video
conferences if they cannot meet in person. Rollins does not have a solo
presence or individual voice in the work; he likens himself to a conductor
and K.O.S. is his orchestra. When it comes to the workshops, the original
members join Rollins to lead "master classes" where they first gather to
discuss the texts and then begin working, adhering acid-free archival book
pages onto a gessoed canvas using archival jade glue. This visual base
forms the physical and contextual foundation for the paintings. Some
projects have included music, as in a project and large-scale print series
collaboration with students at the Kalamazoo
Institute of Arts in Michigan and Pyramid
Atlantic, a non-profit contemporary arts center based in Maryland that
specializes in hand papermaking, printmaking, and bookmaking. The project,
now on view at Colgate University in
Hamilton, NY, evolved as a response to Franz
Josef Haydn's 1798 oratorio The
Creation.
Tim
Rollins and K.O.S.: 25 Years,2007
Exhibition
view Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Courtesy
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.
Photo:
Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich.
|
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. in the late eighties
©
Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
The paintings have a
wide visual range, from pattern paintings and narrative illustrations to a
neo-geo look and even abstraction. In 2007, Rollins and K.O.S. had a major
25-year retrospective at Eva
Presenhuber Gallery in Switzerland. The work on view included projects
from Amerika,
based on Franz Kafka's
book; Shakespeare;
as well as Lewis
Carroll's Alice
in Wonderland and Ralph
Ellison's The
Invisible Man. If the work and paintings have an erudite, yet
down-to-earth demeanor, that's because Rollins' style of teaching is based
on the practice of intervention. He combines the classics with street
smarts, getting the kids to identify simple but strong themes in the
writing. For Amerika, Rollins had the kids focus on the golden
trumpets in the book's last chapter; what ends up on canvas is a series of
trumpets nearly marching across the painting's surface. The K.O.S. version
of Alice finds her in a black-on-black world in a painting titled Black
Alice. The physical and emotional sense of displacement—or just being
out of place—is both the text message and the visual message of the work.
Tim
Rollins and K.O.S.,
Amerika -
Everyone is Welcome ! (after Kafka), 2002
©Tim
Rollins and K.O.S..
Courtesy
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.
Galleria
Raucci/Santamaria, Naples.
Photo:
Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich.
If the
name K.O.S. sounds vaguely like a band, it's probably just a reflection of
those times. After hitchhiking from Maine to New York in 1978, Rollins
moved to the Chelsea Hotel,
home of Sid and Nancy,
the New York Dolls, and the B-52s.
Rollins was in "Harlem on Sundays and CBGB's
during the week." As for Hotel Chelsea, it wasn't exactly the safest spot
to be in, but it was where the action was. Rollins came to New York to
study with conceptual artist Joseph
Kosuth at the School of
Visual Arts, having used his last quarters for the phone call to the
school to see if he could study with his soon-to-be mentor. Rollins had
read the conceptualist's 1969 essay Art After Philosophy and was
struck by "the politics and democracy of the work and its openness. People
think early conceptual art was elitist and exclusionary, but I saw it the
other way around. It allows someone who doesn't have canvas and paint to
do something. Art is idea." Rollins' work began as a mix between Arte
Povera and Conceptual Art; he could be found drawing the town line between
Augusta and Gardiner, Maine with a graphite pencil.
Tim
Rollins and K.O.S.,from the series
"A
Diary of a Young Girl (after Anne Frank)", 2007
©Tim
Rollins and K.O.S.. Private collection.
Courtesy
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.
Galleria
Raucci/Santamaria, Naples.
Photo:
Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich
Rollins was also walking the line between art and religion. Raised by his Revivalist
great grandmother during the summers, Rollins recalls: "She had no running
water, we’d go to Revival Tent meetings and heal in rural Burnham, Maine.
Daddy was hard drinking, bowling alley and Mom believed in God. In Maine,
the only time you had art was Friday afternoons at Church." Even now, the
first place I found the artist was at Harlem’s Baptist
Memorial Church. When I called the receptionist responded: "Praise be
the Lord, can I help you?" In Rollins’ case, his interest in art provided
a way out of a difficult family life. "Daddy was a hand sewer for the
Northeast Shoe Company. When the shop closed, we were on welfare. In
Maine, the stigma is unbelievable. Daddy was an alcoholic, he was
relatively functional, he never hurt me that bad. He was neglectful, but
not violent. A little bit; he was out of it. I’ve forgiven him."
Tim
Rollins and K.O.S.,
from the
series The Creation (after Haydn), 2004
©Tim
Rollins and K.O.S..
Courtesy
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.
Galleria
Raucci/Santamaria, Naples
Photo:
Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich
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