I promise some lighter posts ASAP, right after this exhibit info from the website for the Fry Museum in Seattle:
In August 1981, Tim Rollins, then twenty-six years old, was
recruited by George Gallego, principal of Intermediate School 52 in the South
Bronx, to develop a curriculum that incorporated art-making with reading and
writing lessons for students classified as academically or emotionally “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.” Asked what he meant by “making
history,” Rollins said:
"To dare to make history
when you are young, when you are a minority, when you are working, or
nonworking class, when you are voiceless in society, takes courage. Where we
came from, just surviving is ‘making history.’ So many others, in the same
situations, have not survived, physically, psychologically, spiritually, or
socially. We were making our own history. We weren’t going to accept history as
something given to us."
Together, Rollins and his students developed a collaborative strategy that combined lessons in reading and writing with the production of works of art. In a process they call “jammin’,” Rollins or one of the students read aloud from the selected text while the other members drew, relating the stories to their own experiences. Their signature style was born as Rollins and K.O.S.—Kids of Survival—began producing works of art directly on the pages of these books, cut out and laid in a grid on canvas.