Artist Tim Rollins Joins with Springfield Middle School to Create Works for 'Du Bois in Our Time' Exhibit at UMass Amherst

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – Renowned artist Tim Rollins and members of his collective, Kids of Survival (K.O.S.), will conduct a special residency/workshop March 26-28 with middle school students and teachers at Springfield’s Renaissance Public School.

 

Sponsored by the University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at UMass Amherst, the project will combine lessons in reading and writing with the production of works of art. In a process Tim Rollins and K.O.S. call “jamming,” Rollins or one of the students reads aloud from a selected text while the other members draw and relate the stories to their own experiences. In this way, the classroom is no longer for simply learning about texts but for breathing a new life into them.

 

“Folks new to our work can’t believe we can produce the paintings on such a short period of time but trust me, we do it time and time again,” says Rollins. “It’s got to be fast and furious big time.”

 

For the Springfield project, Rollins has selected “Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil,” an important literary work by W.E.B. Du Bois published in 1920, incorporating autobiographical information as well as essays and spirituals. The results of this collaborative workshop/residency will be featured in a major fall exhibition Du Bois in Our Time at UMCA that will focus on the intersection of art and the major issues of our time, centered on the legacy of Du Bois and the causes he championed. The museum is commissioning a group of internationally acclaimed American, Canadian and West African artists to offer an aesthetic contribution to the rethinking of Du Bois through today’s lens. The exhibition will take place in Amherst from Sept. 10 to Dec. 15.

 

When Rollins started teaching at a school in the South Bronx in 1982, he was recruited by the principal to develop a curriculum that incorporated art-making with reading and writing lessons for students who had been classified as academically “at risk.” Rollins told his students on that first day, “Today we are going to make art, but we are also going to make history.” In 1987, Rollins and K.O.S. began using a traveling workshop format to spread the ideas and inspiration behind their project beyond the South Bronx. In 1994, Rollins and some 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. Today, there are active K.O.S. members in Philadelphia, Memphis, San Francisco, Seattle and New York. The decision by Rollins and K.O.S. to exhibit the art that they created in their classroom in professional galleries and museums marked an important turning point in their history; it signaled the moment they began to distinguish themselves from other teacher-student collaborations and demanded that their work be engaged first as fine art.

 

A screening of the film, “Kids of Survival: The Art and Life of Tim Rollins & K.O.S.” is being shown Wednesday, March 27 at 7:30 p.m. in 137 Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst, as part of the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival. Rollins and his associate Angel Abreu will attend the screening and answer questions.