When Dreams Die by Julie Rollins6/20/2023 ![]() Rollins was just 26 when he began teaching at Intermediate School 52 in the Bronx, where he developed the program that would result in KOS. Tim Rollins and KOS, “By Any Means Necessary (after Malcolm X)” (2008), matte acrylic and book pages on canvas, 72 x 72 in (courtesy Studio KOS, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong) ![]() Some sing like Aretha Franklin and some do not, but everyone is allowed to be in the choir and everyone’s voices are raised in unison in one common song. “It’s like a community choir and people get together. “The great Jane Addams, the Chicago social activist, had a notion of democratic aesthetics,” Rollins told Studio International’s Lilly Wei in 2014. ![]() The conceptual pieces that resulted from Rollins’s collaboration with KOS - typically, large-scale paintings on book pages - often derived meaning through the combination of the marks made and the text of the chosen books that served as backdrops, which ranged from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). A lifelong artist and activist, Rollins developed his collaborative practice while teaching middle school art classes in the South Bronx in the early 1980s. He died of natural causes, according to the members of KOS. ![]() The artist Tim Rollins, who is best known for his work with the collective KOS (Kids of Survival), has died at age 62. Tim Rollins and KOS at Lehmann Maupin in 2016 (courtesy Lehmann Maupin) ![]()
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