Tim Rollins
Kids of Survival (K.O.S.)
Study for Amerika-A Refuge
1991
In 1981 the artist Tim Rollins developed a curriculum for Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx that incorporated art-making with reading and writing for students classified as academically and emotionally at risk. Rollins and his group of young artists known as K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) followed a collaborative process of “educating by art making.” Rather than reading books as received knowledge, Rollins and K.O.S. painted directly on texts, creating works that actualized their learning experience. These works are studies made by individual K.O.S. members for a series of larger paintings based on Franz Kafka’s incomplete first novel Amerika. Written between 1912 and 1914 and published posthumously in 1927, Amerika follows teenager Karl Rossmann as he is banished from his home in Prague and sent to New York City, where he suffers one ordeal after another. In the unfinished final chapter, Rossman finds a job with a mysterious and surreal Midwestern traveling theater, where he encounters hundreds of women dressed as angels playing golden horns. Prompted by this passage, Rollins and the K.O.S. members imagined a variety of golden horns informed by such diverse sources as human anatomy manuals, comic books, popular films, and paintings. FA18 (Common Read)
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Artist
Tim Rollins
(American, 1955–2017)
Kids of Survival (K.O.S.) (American artists’ collective, formed 1982)
- Title Study for Amerika-A Refuge
- Date 1991
- Medium Watercolor and pencil on book page
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Dimensions
unframed | 8 x 5 3/16 in.
- Credit line University purchase with funds from Nathan Cummings, by exchange, 1992
- Object number WU 1992.15
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Technique
painting
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Work type
watercolor
painting
The Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist; the Artist as Writer
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 11/07/1997 - 12/21/1997
Twentieth Century Art from the Washington University Collection
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/28/1994 - 03/27/1994
1992
Schmidt Contemporary Art
Inscription Verso, lower center, in graphite: For Amerika-A Refuge / TR + K.O.S. / South Bronx 1991
Inscription Verso, along top edge, in graphite: 52
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