Tim Rollins and K.O.S.


Tim Rollins was an American artist who together with the art collaborative K.O.S. formed the art-group Tim Rollins and K.O.S.

Biography

Timothy William Rollins was born on June 10, 1955 in Pittsfield, Maine. Rollins was a day student at the Maine Central Institute before studying fine art at the University of Maine. He then earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. After graduate studies in art education and philosophy at New York University, Rollins began teaching art for middle school students in a South Bronx public school. In 1984, he launched the "Art and Knowledge Workshop" in the Bronx together with a group of at-risk students who called themselves K.O.S..
Since the founding of the Art & Knowledge Workshop in 1982, Tim Rollins & K.O.S. have produced allegorical paintings, sculptures and drawings by mining the vast wealth of printed matter - from the popular to the arcane, from the minor to the canonical, from legal documents to comic books - which are themselves understood as political allegories.
The group has exhibited worldwide having participated in two Whitney Biennials, Documenta, the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International and in solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota ; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts ; Dia Art Foundation, New York, New York ; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut ; Museum für Gegenwärtskunst Basel, Switzerland ; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California ; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C..
Their work can be seen in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Tate Gallery, London.
In February 2009, a retrospective survey of the groups' work opened at The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery] at Skidmore College.
The current members of K.O.S., at the time of Rollins' death at age 62 in December 2017, included Angel Abreu, Jorge Abreu, Robert Branch, Ala Ebtekar, Ricardo Nelson Savinon, and Noe Sosa