TIM ROLLINS and COLLAB

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name
-Theseus
A Midsummer Nights Dream (V.i.14-17)

On Wednesday, March 26, renowned educator and artist, Tim Rollins, came to Staples to work with the collab students. Rollins is the founder of the Art and Knowledge Workshop, a studio for students to use critical inquiry to make abstract connections between classic works of literature and modern art. Since 1984, Rollins and KOS (Kids of Survival) have exhibited their works in museums and galleries around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rollins conducted a workshop for the collab students using Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, to initiate their study of contemporary U.S. history and literature for the fourth quarter.

BACKGROUND ON ROLLINS AND KOS
Tim Rollins wrote a few years ago that he used the profession of schoolteacher as a cover. The same could be said of the way he uses the profession of artist. Rollins is something else, when he gets together with K.O.S.-Kids of Survival. They are among the most effective cross-cultural mutations created. Their work is a hybrid, disturbingly familiar and simultaneously jolting and not post or neo anything. Its roots are deep in concrete, in urban popular and street culture. It is both innocent and sophisticated, violent and compassionate. It is often created "undercover" on New York's Lower East Side, South Bronx, Harlem, Williamsburg and Bed Stuy, sometimes as a cross-class collaboration.

Rollins began to work with supposedly "learning disabled" and "emotionally handicapped" Junior High students in the South Bronx in 1980. He participated in programs that promote art as a road to reading, but his definition of reading goes way beyond the conventional notion of getting your letters together. When the K.O.S. read, they read. They-expose meanings most teachers don't care to cope with. They understand and underline, interpret and intercept. They use the profession of student as a cover for their own subversive activities as artists-education against the odds.

The method is simple. They read a book and they deconstruct it, both physically and analytically. As Rollins reads aloud, the other artists "draw like crazy." Then they all sit down together and distill the thousand or so sketches until they arrive at a few, key images - "pictures that look mysterious yet truthful." Finally these fragments of literary criticism are transposed by various techniques onto the large, flat grid, or field, of printed pages. The results, in Rollins' words, are "ideological battlescenes, and they portray the epic, furious combat that we all do daily in our wars between inculcated, fatalist belief and the oppressed, buried, and yet deep-rooted. will to making radical social change."

The books tackled by the K.O.S. over the years would make up a pretty astounding college lit course. They include Brecht, Burroughs, newspapers, comic books, 1984, The Red Badge of Courage, The Wasteland, Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, Moby Dick, and The Autobiography of Malcom X. K.O.S. began with a raucous figuration and have now expanded to subtle metaphor and abstraction as well. The earlier series of individual responses have given way to unified imagery, collectively bargained. In the process, the K.O.S. bring to the book at hand their own associations, their unrestricted responses to their own lives and surroundings, which are usually drastically dissimilar to the authors'.

WORKS BY ROLLINS AND KOS
	*Amerika: For the People of Bathgate* 1989-96		*Amerika I* 1984-85
Rotunda Education Building University of South Florida 2002		*Midsummer Night's Dream* 2000
	*The Scarlet Letter V* 1994		Red Badge of Courage 1986