From the Bronx to Hammersmith: Andrew Graham-Dixon on the work of Tim Rollins and KOS
STEVE from Ealing, who is 18, said "I want you to put in your paper that some of these big exhibitions, at the Hayward or the National Gallery, are very intimi-dating to black people. You walk through the door and you see the other people in there looking at you and thinking 'What the hell are you doing in here?' Not the staff — half the guards are black anyway — but the visitors. The main point of this, that really freaked me out, is that this artist has bothered and he really cares about young people who are interested in art. He's not some old, superior, arty-farty type — this guy's coming out to help other people."
"This guy" is Tim Rollins, a teacher and artist from New York's South Bronx who spent most of last week at the River-side Gallery in Hammersmith, working with 14 local teenagers — Steve among them — on a collaborative art project. The result, a painting based on Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage, goes on show tomorrow. The exhibition also includes several works by Rollins and "The Kids of Survival", the predomi-nantly Hispanic teenagers he works with in New York.
Tim Rollins and KOS add up to one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the contemporary art world. What started out as an educational process — Rollins' "Art and Knowledge Workshop", which he set up with the intention of developing the artistic talents of "educationally dis-advantaged" children — has resulted in some of the most challenging and com-mercially successful art of the late 1980s. Tim Rollins and KOS sell their paintings for many thousands of dollars; they are globally represented, "by Jay Gorney Modern Art...
