By Any Means Necessary: Mecca
Artist: Tim Rollins (American, 1955 - 2017)
Artist: K.O.S. (American, founded 1982)
Date: 1985-1987
Dimensions:
H: 21 in. (53.3 cm); W: 28 in. (71.1 cm)
Medium: Black gesso on book pages mounted on canvas.
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Gift of Dr. & Mrs. Julius H. Jacobson, by exchange
Object number: 2006.46
Label Text:As a teacher of at-risk teenagers at a tough South Bronx school in the 1980s, conceptual artist Tim Rollins combined literature and art in his classes, declaring it “unethical to have kids painting when they could not spell the word painting.” His students really responded to his unorthodox teaching methods, so Rollins formed an extracurricular program called the Art of Knowledge Workshop, where the young participants named themselves K.O.S., or “Kids of Survival.”
Rollins’s “kids” tackle reading and interpretation of some of the most important works of American and European literature. They read a book—in this case, Malcolm X’s impassioned By Any Means Necessary—and deconstruct it, both physically and analytically. As Rollins reads aloud, the other artists “draw like crazy.” Then as a group they distill the thousand or so sketches until they arrive at a few key images—“pictures that look mysterious yet truthful.” Finally these fragments of literary criticism are transposed onto the grid, or field, of printed pages. The results, in Rollins' words, are “ideological battlescenes, and they portray the epic, furious combat that we all do daily in our wars between inculcated, fatalist belief and the oppressed, buried, and yet deep-rooted will to making radical social change.”
Rollins’s “kids” tackle reading and interpretation of some of the most important works of American and European literature. They read a book—in this case, Malcolm X’s impassioned By Any Means Necessary—and deconstruct it, both physically and analytically. As Rollins reads aloud, the other artists “draw like crazy.” Then as a group they distill the thousand or so sketches until they arrive at a few key images—“pictures that look mysterious yet truthful.” Finally these fragments of literary criticism are transposed onto the grid, or field, of printed pages. The results, in Rollins' words, are “ideological battlescenes, and they portray the epic, furious combat that we all do daily in our wars between inculcated, fatalist belief and the oppressed, buried, and yet deep-rooted will to making radical social change.”
On view
In Collection(s)