Tim Rollins and K.O.S

Tim Rollins is an artist who founded K.O.S (kids of survival) an artist collective based around the collaboration of artists and socially disadvantaged kids.  K.O.S was formed when Rollins was teaching a class of junior high school kids with supposed "learning disabilities" in the South Bronx. After noticing many of the kids had extraordinary artistic talent yet limited reading abilities, Rollins introduced an alternative method of learning: reading aloud literary texts to the kids whilst they responded by drawing. Rollins then collects all the drawings and transforms them into one unified painting. For example Franz Kafkas novel Amerika was studied and then transformed into a series of paintings called the Amerika series. Rollins and K.O.S exemplify issues surrounding art being a tool of social transformation, encouraging the idea that art that directly works within the social framework with which it is concerned is far more valuable on a transformative level than one that stays within the confinement of an elitist art world, any political attempt often undermined by its commodity status.

Rollins comments "Just because you've made a revolution in art dose'nt mean you can ignore the problem of making social transformation as well. This idea informs our own working method. We rewrite the books with our lives, our images, to make new meaning".