Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Jef Geys: KOME, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België and Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in 2012. Design by Luc Derycke.
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).
Michael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. His poems regularly appear in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, and elsewhere. He is the author of two books of poems, The End of the West, and Flies, which won the James Laughlin Award.
Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.
British artist Paul Elliman has consistently engaged with the production and performance of language as a material component of the socially constructed environment. In a world where objects and people are equally subject to the force fields of mass production, Elliman explores the range of human expression as kind of typography.
Published as a contribution to David Bennewith’s exhibition Latent Stare at CasCo, Utrecht, Netherlands, 2012.