Tim Rollins (1955–2018)

A New York Times obituary describes Tim Rollins as “an artist and educator whose mural-like paintings inspired by literary classics brought 1980s art stardom to him and his collaborators — a shifting collective of at-risk South Bronx teenagers.” Together they were known as Tim Rollins + K.O.S., meaning Kids of Survival. The Times describes the way they worked:

It was a demanding process, which Mr. Rollins oversaw from beginning to end. The authors he selected were challenging and included Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Lewis Carroll and Malcolm X. Digesting their writings could take weeks, and arriving at a suitable motif, a process they called jammin’, could take months.

Among the group’s other source materials: Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Duke Ellington’s The River: A Ballet Suite. Here are two samplings of the work of Tim Rollins + K.O.S.: one, two.