Art News

Museum für Gegenwartskunst shows a new selection of works by Tim Rollins + K.O.S.

BASEL.- More than twenty years after the Museum für Gegenwartskunst first presented the art of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), the collective now shows a new selection of works. Based on Tim Rollins’s studies of art as a form of collaboration in which individual creativity becomes operative as an agent of social change, the works pay poetic homage to the community, but also represent a political reference to the potential inherent in each individual. When Rollins started teaching in a school in New York’s South Bronx in 1982, he developed a pedagogical method of social activism that aimed to foreground individual abilities. In his workshop “Art and Knowledge,” launched in one of America’s most acutely deprived areas, Rollins and his study group began to use classical and modern literature, philosophy, and political theory as raw materials. The writings of Martin Luther King, Lewis Carr