Center for Curatorial Studies Presents
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. in conversation with Wendy Tronrud
Thursday, May 8, 2014
CCS Bard Seminar Room 1
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard CollegeSeminar Room
RSVP to [email protected]
The collaborative history of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. began in 1981, when Rollins was recruited to teach at Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx, developing a curriculum that used art as a means to knowledge and incorporated art-making with reading and writing lessons for students classified as “at risk” or learning disabled. By 1984, Rollins launched the Art and Knowledge Workshop in an abandoned school building, functioning as an after-school program with a group of his self-selected students. The teaching artist and his students soon began to call themselves Kids of Survival, or K.O.S., collaboratively producing paintings, prints, photographs, and sculpture based on a critical engagement with classic Western literary texts. Exploring connections between literature and the complex social, political, and ideological factors that shaped the students’ daily lives in the South Bronx, the works created at this time include their now iconic interventions onto the pages of books, which are cut out and laid in a grid on canvas. Between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Rollins and K.O.S. participated in two of the Whitney Museum Biennials, Documenta, and the Venice Biennale, and had solo shows at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Dia Art Foundation, amongst others. In 1994, they moved their operation to a studio in New York’s Chelsea arts district, where Rollins and long-term K.O.S. members rebuilt and expanded the project nationally and internationally, significantly increasing the number of workshops conducted with other schools and arts institutions. Thirty years after the group was first formed, there are active K.O.S. members working across the United States, and they continue to be exhibited worldwide, with their work is represented in public and private collections, including the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art.
Wendy Tronrud is a teacher who is currently working on her doctorate in American Literature at the CUNY Grad Center. Her research focuses included 18th-early 20th Century African American literature, aesthetics, 19th-20th century poetry and she is busy working on a prison narrative from 1892. Presently, she teaches writing and literature courses at Queens College. In 2008, Wendy earned her Masters in Teaching Literature from Bard College after which she taught 9/10th grade Humanities for four years at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the South Bronx
For more information, call 845-758-7598, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://www.bard.edu/ccs/the-third-idiom/.
Location: CCS Bard Seminar Room 1