In 1980 Rollins began teaching art for middle school students in a South Bronx public school. In 1982, he launched the “Art and Knowledge Workshop” in the Bronx together with a group of at-risk students who called themselves K.O.S. (Kids of Survival). You can read more in Julia Ault’s great dedication here.

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) have been collaboratively drawing and painting on book pages since 1982. The publication has been conceived as a guide to this work, analyzing the group’s artistic method from its inception through to today. The aim is to set up an index that gathers together all the books on which the group has worked: each one is discussed based on the reasons for its selection, alongside images of the work itself.

The current members of K.O.S., at the time of Rollins’ death at age 62 in December 2017, included Angel Abreu (b. 1974), Jorge Abreu (b. 1979), Robert Branch (b. 1977), Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978), Ricardo Nelson Savinon (b. 1971), Noe Sosa (b. 1992), and Logan Swedick (b. 1995).

Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery, New York, 7 June–21 July, 1990.

A.R. Penck was a German Neo-Expressionist whose paintings of figures and symbols nod to both German Expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Art Brut. Penck’s Standart works, which employ a lexicon of pictograph-like marks the artist referred to as “building blocks”, are essential in understanding both his process and ideology. Though often associated with the graffiti-based work of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, his style emerged independently as a response to the censorship of the German Democratic Republic. Expelled to West Germany by the GDR Communist regime in 1980, he became a part of a milieu of Neo-Expressionist painters which included Markus Lüpertz and Jörg Immendorff.

Published on the occasion of Wols Photograph, at Museum Ludwig, Köln, 31 January–11 March, 1979. Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin–1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of lyrical abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement.

Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902–24 February 1975) was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer. Alexandrian Salane (Author), Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (Translation).

Essay #1 in the series by S*I*G Verlag. Designed in collaboration with Sara De Bondt. Edited by Megan Francis Sullivan.

Essay #3 in the series by S*I*G Verlag. Designed in collaboration with Sara De Bondt. Edited by Megan Francis Sullivan.