R.I.P. Tim Rollins

Artlyst reports that the artist Tim Rollins has died, age 62. He co-founded Group Material in Manhattan, 1979 with Julie Ault and Félix González-Torres before going on to start the artist collective Kids of Survival (K.O.S.).

‘We embrace the idea of the arena of art existing in the fourth dimension of a social imagination beyond space and time, contingency and possibility.’ Tim Rollins and K.O.S.

Rollins was born in 1955 in Pittsfield, Maine. His experience in a relatively poor household helped him understand “the struggles of the kids’ families,” he told the New York Times in 1988. He came to New York in 1975, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts and was taught by Conceptual art pioneer Joseph Kosuth—an experience that he described as formative to his practice.

Tim Rollins began his career teaching art for special education middle school students in a South Bronx public school. In 1984, he launched the Art and Knowledge Workshop, an afterschool program for his most dedicated students, who named themselves Kids of Survival (K.O.S.).

Tim Rollins argued that “Great art is an instrument of God". This is so, Rollins states, because you have to “bring faith to art as you do to God” and artists imitate “the penultimate creativity of God.”

Rollins’ collaboration with the members of K.O.S. took the form of drawings, sculptural objects, paintings on canvas and paper. They highlighted quotes from books, plays, operas and prose with which they engaged as they relate the stories to their own experiences or to politics. Their art was created directly on these inspirational texts.

These involved reading and researching inspirational texts in order to find images that make literature visible. K.O.S. artist Robert Branch has spoken of this process as one which involved struggle in a social experience. He said, “Art making doesn’t come with written instructions, with a step-by-step process.” Instead, you “just kind of feel it out” because art “is a process of faith.” In this way, Rollins suggested, you “become an instrument for something that cannot be articulated any other way.” “Like the paint, you’re a medium” for “some spirit … making something manifest.” This process of faith, Rollins said, was about making “the invisible visible, vision becoming visible, and making hope material, power manifest, and Spirit sensuous.”

Click here for more on Tim Rollins and K.O.S.

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Lauryn Hill - To Zion.