Amerika Agape
Tim Rollins and the K.O.S

In November, 2002, the internationally recognized artist Tim Rollins came to Drexel University to conduct a workshop compromised of sixteen students from the Philadelphia School District and nine students from Drexel's College of Media Arts and Design. Under Rollins guidance, the students developed individual drawings based upon a chosen passage from Kafka's novel Amerika. These drawings were then projected and traced onto a canvas covered with pages from the text of Kafka's novel. The canvas was then taken back to the collective workshop maintained by Rollins in the South Bronx where a group of students called the Kids of Survival collaborated with him in synthesizing and rendering the drawings into a new museum-quality painting measuring 6" by 7" entitled Amerika Agape. The final result of this creative process along with all of the students drawings are on display in the present exhibition.

Tim Rollins is an artist who produces his artwork through a unique process of creative collaboration with inner city youths. He typically proceeds by organizing student workshops in which he first requires the participants to read and interpret a classic literary text under his direction (e.g., Kafka's Amerika, or Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage); he then challenges the students to create visual images that are expressive of the essential concerns, values, or ideas found in some part of the book. This workshop production is then brought back to the K.O.S. studio in New York for synthesis into a final artwork by Tim Rollins and his young collaborators. Their success in the art world has been nothing short of phenomenal over the past two decades and their works now hang in many of the world's great museums, including the Tate Gallery in London, the Hirshorn in Washington, The Museum of Modern Art in NY, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 

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