On A Clear Night, I Can See The Sun: Tim Rollins and K.O.S. test Faith's Possibilities

James Romaine

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
—William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream

FROM The Earth To The Moon, a painting in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is an expanse of blue-black darkness with bits of broken auto glass and mirror dispersed across its surface. The work is subtle and unassuming, not the brazen sort of aesthetic that often characterizes contemporary art. You might walk by it without paying any attention, but, if you stop and look into this painting, it offers an entire new universe of experiences.

The title refers to a Jules Verne novel in which a group of explorers challenge each other to attempt the impossible, a story that intriguingly parallels the story of the painting's creators, the collaborative team of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival). Since 1980, Rollins, an artist, curator, educator, and activist “from the political wing of the conceptual art movement,” has worked with African-American and Latino students from the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City.

Despite early art-world successes with the collective Group Material, at a young age Rollins became dissatisfied with what he perceived as conceptual art's limited potential for realizing meaningful political change. After studying art education and political philosophy at New York University, Rollins put theory into practice by becoming a special-education teacher in the Bronx and founding the Art and Knowledge Workshop, an after-school program that used art-making as an educational vehicle, out of which K.O.S. was born in 1982.

Rollins and K.O.S. collaboratively create paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints based on their reading of literary texts and musical scores that form the conceptual and physical foundation of their art. Their works are birthed through a three-way collaboration between Rollins, K.O.S., and a text's author. They begin new pieces by reading works of literature such as Franz Kafka's Amerika or Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Rollins reads aloud while K.O.S. members sketch. A collective analysis of the text's historic meaning and modern relevance as well as what imagery might best represent their response to the literature is followed by the painting of selected imagery over book pages which have been laid in a grid on canvas in such a way that the imagery both illuminates and disrupts the text.

Although Rollins and K.O.S. have been the subject of several catalogues and hundreds of essays and reviews, it is not widely known that both their concern for social justice and strategy of activism have been profoundly influenced by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Not only was the civil rights movement the main formative influence on Rollins's personal spiritual and political philosophy, but King's strategy of nonviolent direct action has sustained Rollins and K.O.S. throughout their career. King's spirit permeates their art.

Rollins is a charismatic educator and speaker, who animates audiences of all ages with the fervor of Baptist revival preacher and his passion for racial, economic, and social justice. I met him in the Chelsea studio he shares with K.O.S. on Martin Luther King Day, and we spoke about the civil rights leader's impact on their art. Although Pittsfield, Maine, was far removed from any center of civil rights activity, Rollins recalls seeing King on television every day and found in this “magisterial figure” a “paragon of political righteousness.” He adds, “What I learned from King and the civil rights movement was that we don't have to accept society, politics, and identity they way they're handed to us, that change is not only possible, but inevitable.”

King's impact on Rollins was affected by a shared progressive Baptist background that emphasized putting faith into action. Rollins describes his religious upbringing as “Bapticostal” (part Baptist and part Pentecostal) and himself a “red letter” Christian (a reference to Bible editions in which Christ's words are printed in red): “All of the Bible is important, but the first thing you read are the words in red.”

With the exception of Jesus Christ, Rollins, says, King has been and remains the most influential figure in his life. For Rollins, King represents everything that a Christian should be. King addressed critical questions concerning faith's function in a modern society and how the love ethos of the Sermon on the Mount might be realized in America today.

Like King, Rollins is critical of what the civil rights leader called the “paralysis of analysis.” Rollins sees this immobilization in many political artists whose work remains in a perpetual state of critique, mistaking critique for direct action. Rollins acknowledges that critique is a form of action, but counters that it is a “pretty low-impact” form of action and rarely makes effective change. “Change requires a higher level of commitment. It means putting yourself on the line.” Rollins calls King his most admired performance artist because he made faith real through social action. “King made faith real; he used symbols but he didn't only operate in the realm of the symbolic. He made faith proactive and applied it pragmatically in direct and life-effective ways.” Contrasting King with the German performance artist and activist Joseph Beuys [see Plate 2], Rollins said, “I revere Beuys, but he was only able to operate in the realm of the symbolic. It was great that he founded a political party for animals. It's great that he put fat on a chair, and that made a statement, but he could never cross the border into direct action.” For a different model of what art should be, Rollins, who is ministry leader for praise and worship at Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem , looks to his choir experience: “Gospel music is not about Jesus,” he says; “it is the direct visceral expression, demonstration, and manifestation of Jesus.” Turning back to the visual arts, he adds, “Pollock wasn't painting about anything. He was creating the thing, the experience itself.” Of his collaboration with K.O.S., Rollins says, “We are the ultimate process art, but the process allows change. Futures are altered, expectations are transformed. We took performance art into the social arena, into a context where lives are changed.”

King defined love using the Greek words: eros , what has come to be understood as romantic love; philia , a reciprocal love; and agape, which King described as an abundant love that seeks nothing in return. Rollins maintains that art is agape made manifest. “It is the love that I have for my kids and that they have for me that makes the project go. If that didn't happen, no one would be in the studio.”

Agape manifested itself through King's philosophy of nonviolent resistance, a philosophy of action that used collective demonstration and resistance, motivated by love, to effect social change without violence. This method was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, who was influenced in turn, Rollins points out, by Henry David Thoreau's “Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” Rollins shares Thoreau's transcendentalist mix of optimism and pragmatism. One of the best Amerika paintings, a picture of trumpets that sound to celebrate the commencement of a new era of joy and freedom, is dedicated to Thoreau [see Plate 5].

But it was King who provided Rollins with a historical precedent and moral compass. Without the influence of King, Rollins might not have gone to the Bronx , and he probably would not have had the strategy to survive there. In Strength to Love, King argued that love has to be demonstrated in some concrete form or action; for Rollins, that meant giving up a potentially lucrative place in the art world for a Bronx classroom. Although in retrospect this was a turning point in Rollins's life and work, it was not, at the time, a career move; in fact, it was both career and life risking:

I didn't just take the 6 train to Longwood Avenue and start introducing myself, saying, “Hi. I've come to help you people.” At first, my intention was just to be there for two weeks, but when I saw the situation, I couldn't do anything else but stay.... I think the voice of King was somewhere in the back of my consciousness, saying, “If you leave this place, if you walk away from this, don't even talk to me, don't talk about me, and don't say that I'm your hero.”

Rollins did stay, and, motivated by the spirit of Christ and the method of King, he developed a studio that makes more than art, a workshop that has become a community.

King wrote:

Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community.... The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is a symbol of God's triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation.

Says Rollins:

We've been using the power of the Holy Spirit to restore community in the South Bronx, in Memphis , in San Francisco , in Philadelphia . Art is a way to bind people who would not have made any connection previously.... Some people are afraid of the Spirit because they think that it is metaphysical, but nothing could be more concrete. Look at the example of my life, at my kid's lives, at our art.

Rollins believes that making art is a faith proposition. In one of the group's works, this faith component is represented by a single mustard seed archivally placed among vibrant watercolor flowers, flowers that spread across a series of works based on William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream [see Plates 6 and 7]. The reference is to the red-letter text of Mathew 13: “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard.... It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it is grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree so that all the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” Rollins and K.O.S. approach to art-making the same way: they take small things, like broken auto glass, and make works of art that hang in museums for the world to see.

Rollins and K.O.S.'s collaboration provides a pioneering and stimulating model of the interconnection of art and social action at a historical moment when artists have become increasingly conscious of their societal responsibilities. Rollins and K.O.S.'s art is not just about racial reconciliation and social justice; it is racial reconciliation and social justice in action.

Their attitude toward their materials and imagery is no less unique. In The Temptation of Saint Anthony: The Trinity , based on Gustave Flaubert's drama about the struggle between faith and reason, they used alcohol and animal blood to create monstrously beautiful forms that hover between abstraction and nitty-gritty representation, between figments of the mind and cells of the body [see Plate 4]. The imagery depicts struggle and metamorphosis, forcing material and form against each other like wrestlers in an arena. As spirit and matter push toward equilibrium, imagery seems to struggle out of the void, and the work becomes a visual manifestation of speaking in tongues.

Rollins's philosophy is, simply put, that art materializes the immaterial. Every work of art achieves something that, until the moment before, had not existed, something perhaps literally inconceivable, until conceived through the struggle of the creative process. Once the work has survived this process, it has power and presence. Then it is. Says Rollins:

Art is exactly like prayer. It is as powerful or as futile as prayer. If you don't believe in prayer, prayer won't do you any good. But if you do believe in it, prayer can move mountains. Art to me has always been a form of prayer. The silliest thing a person can do is to take a stick with hairs on it, dip it in a colored liquid, then run it across a surface and hang it on the wall. But something in this process is connected with something fundamental to being human.

The message of every work of art is I am , says Rollins. “The work of art is about visualizing abstract truth. It is truth that requires expression. We don't make art because it is fun; we make art because we feel compelled to.” This urge to communicate is evident in a work like Invisible Man [see Plate 8]. The opening line of Ralph Ellison's novel, “I am an invisible man,” speaks to our compulsion to communicate, our desire to be recognized, as if being seen by others allows our personality to be realized. Says Rollins, “In saying, ‘I am an invisible man,' you are no longer invisible. Art makes you visible.” He means that the work of art becomes a physical manifestation of the mature personality, of the selfhood, self-knowledge, memory, purpose, freedom, responsibility, imagination, moral value, will, and action of its creator.

The motif of Rollins and K.O.S.'s Invisible Man , the capital letters IM, is at once text and image. It evokes Moses's encounter with God, the supreme personality, the only truly complete personality, who expressed himself in the creation of the universe.

In doing research for I See the Promised Land, Rollins and K.O.S. came across Ernest Withers's photographs of Memphis sanitation workers marching with signs that read I AM A MAN. They also found a newspaper headline with the word VICTIM and cut out the IM, transforming an identity defined by a reactive helplessness and misfortune to “I am,” a statement of full and free personality. Freedom is not a concept that Rollins and K.O.S. allow to remain in the realm of the abstract. To them, being free means refusing to be limited by internal or external disadvantages such as economic class or learning disability. They choose freedom over bowing to fate. “Art is the fundamental demonstration of freedom,” says Rollins. It's a “constant analysis, reconstruction, and redevelopment of what it means to be free.”

Rollins has described the entirety of his artistic project with K.O.S. as an attempt to realize what King called the beloved community, an environment in which self-realization and mutual advancement were not only possible but encouraged. It was, King said, the ultimate objective of nonviolent resistance. King's dream of the beloved community was rooted in the Hebraic prophetic tradition, in which God's prophets addressed both spiritual and social ills. In The Trumpet of Conscience, King wove together references to no less than seven different Hebrew prophecies:

I still have a dream today that one day justice will roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream [Amos 5:24]. I still have a dream today that in all of our state houses and city halls men will be elected to go there who will do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God [Micah 6:8]. I still have a dream today that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise against nations, neither will they study war any more [Isaiah 2:4]. I still have a dream today that one day the lamb and lion will lie down together [Isaiah 11:6], and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid [Micah 4:4]. I still have a dream today that one day every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill be made low, the rough places will be made smooth and the crooked places straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together [Isaiah 40:3-5].... It will be a glorious day, the morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy [Job 38:7].

Harvey Cox, in God's Revolution and Man's Responsibility, connects King's dream to the Hebrew word shalom. Often translated as “peace,” shalom means something broader and more positive than the absence of hostility, Cox writes. Shalom is a condition of existence in which righteousness, joy, and love flourish in society. Cox argues that shalom includes three elements: reconciliation to ourselves, others, and God; freedom from bondage and for maturity, responsibility, and service; and hope oriented toward the potential of this world for shalom within history. Rollins and K.O.S. have actively realized reconciliation, freedom, and hope through their art and community. At a time when many artists, even Beuys to a certain extent, have used the prophetic role of the artist as an excuse for self-indulgence, Rollins and K.O.S. are true prophets of shalom, a peace that is realized in love and kinship.

The beloved community is only possible when individuals sacrifice out of love for one another. Rollins and K.O.S. practice this in their collaboration. Every member of the group participates in all aspects of the creative process. They encourage and challenge each other along the way, testing the limits of the conceptual and technical capability. King argued that all life in the universe is interrelated and involved in a single process, a single history, and moves toward a single destiny. Art, Rollins says, naturally celebrates and facilitates human connectedness. Most art, if it brings people together at all, unites them after it is created. With K.O.S., Rollins developed a strategy to make the social aspect of art part of its very creation. He says:

Our works look like maps of the beloved community. What does the beloved community look like? It looks like the Amerika paintings, like the Red Badge of Courage paintings, like the Creation paintings. We are not projecting here; this is not a fantasy. We really created a beloved community.

Rollins and K.O.S.'s attempt to realize King's beloved community in their studio raises a question that has preoccupied them for more than two decades: is there a King aesthetic? The 2002 Smithsonian exhibition In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , with 118 artists participating, demonstrated the breadth of artistic response to King's life and work. Some artists paid visual tribute to King as an icon, social leader, preacher, or just as a man. Other artists made works that comment on civil rights issues. For some artists, King is a personal role model and hero while for others, like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, he is just one of many American social phenomena. Some of these artists work in the vernacular of folk art while others carry on the visual legacy of modernism. The diversity of artistic responses to King complicates any possible definition of a King aesthetic.

Rollins and K.O.S. contributed I See the Promised Land. Inspired by King's last sermon, delivered the night before he was assassinated, theirs was one of the exhibition's few abstract works [see Plate 11]. The painting's dominant form is a brilliant red triangle, its apex extending to the top edge of the painting. The triangle, which Rollins sees as a central motif in King's writings, evokes his essay “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” (King's three dimensions are loving yourself, loving others, and realizing the love of God) but could be read as a reference to the Trinity. It also relates directly to a passage at the beginning of the sermon in which King describes taking a mental flight across history: from Egypt and its pyramids, he would go to Mount Olympus to converse with great philosophers of ancient Greece, then on to the Roman Empire, known for its roads, and to the Renaissance, where artists learned to represent space in a picture through lines of recession, and finally to the present day, where the promised land came within sight. The triangle in I See the Promised Land, whether it is read as a pyramid, a mountain, or a road receding into the distance, is at once a stable and highly dynamic composition. It visually captures King's belief that history is not stagnant but moves toward a goal ordained by God; that though progress may appear to be slow, the outcome is certain. It is this faith that God is on the side of justice that has given Rollins and K.O.S. the perseverance to see their project through.

I See the Promised Land is literally a red passage. A visual and mental flight that crosses over the text, it evokes the Red Sea journey out of Egypt toward the Promised Land. For the Jewish people, as for King, the Exodus is a moment when God intervened in history, leading the people of Israel out of slavery. King used the Exodus as a metaphor for the civil rights movement's fight against segregation, and Rollins has applied it to the psychological and spiritual slavery that, even today, is far too prevalent in neighborhoods like the South Bronx.

Rollins and K.O.S. don't often directly reference King, but they make art by the same principles of love and faith that characterized his message. They have applied King's principle of agape practiced through nonviolent resistance in their socially concerned art through their emphasis on beauty, hope and joy—qualities that differentiate their work from a majority of activist art, even art concerned with the same issues as King but not possessing his spirit, art often characterized by enraged laments.

Of the difference between rage and anger, Rollins says:

There is a righteous anger that is the fuel in my gas tank. I'm angry that our schools are in the condition that they are. I'm angry that my kids are so nihilistic. I'm angry that their parents are so neglectful. Anger fuels our work, but it's a loving anger. It is an anger that gives you the energy to say, I'm not going to take things as they have been given to me; I'm going to change things. Rage is a whole other thing. Rage doesn't get you anywhere. Unfortunately, we live in a culture of rage. Rage doesn't do anything except carry within it the seeds of its own destruction. Rage is irrational; it has no strategy or methodology for change. You can never create beauty out of rage.

Works like Amerika and the recent Creation series were made from a belief that joy and beauty are more powerfully persuasive forces for social change than rage. Rather than lamenting problems, these works propose alternative solutions. In Creation, a series inspired by Haydn's oratorio, Rollins and K.O.S. return to the Genesis narrative and apply their own imagination to the creation of the cosmos [see Plates 9 and 10]. These works' reenactment of creation affirms that beauty can emerge from chaos and that individuals, working collaboratively, can create a universe of their own imagination and reshape the world according to their vision. While these works might seem utopian, we should remember that Rollins has realized his vision both in material works of art and the living community of K.O.S. They demonstrate that creating a universe of joy and beauty need not only remain in the realm of the symbolic but can also be a life-effective political strategy. Says Rollins:

It's about being able to connect with people on a one-to-one level and thereby being able to imagine a more collective action. That's the relationship I have with the kids. I think our art is like that. Works like Amerika and Temptation of Saint Anthony might be a little weird, but they are still accessible; any one can see what they are about. They don't alienate the viewer. Everyone is welcome. It's too easy to make something obtuse and obfuscating. Beauty is much more complex and, after all, only beauty can save the world. What is beautiful? Any experience that you have that makes you glad to be alive.

There is nothing abject about his and K.O.S.' work, Rollins insists. Even though the abject and the grotesque are trendy at the present, he and his team have shunned this strategy:

The abject was what was expected of us. We were either supposed represent African-American and Latino clichés or we were supposed to be doing paintings about our constant and irredeemable suffering. Both are tired, boring, superficial, simplistic. What was not expected of us was beauty. Beauty is important to us, and craft is important to us, because we are not just making art, we are making history.

Rollins isn't boasting about their place in the history of art, through they will certainly find a place there. For K.O.S., making history means not having to accept identity and society as you found them. The power to make history means that it's possible to take the script written for you—a script that reads “learning disabled,” that dictates that you will have inadequate education and have trouble finding a meaningful job, that you will be psychologically and spiritually oppressed, that you will be robbed of self-respect, that you cannot imagine a world different from what you find yourself in—and paint the beautiful picture of your hope all over it.

Says Rollins:

I work with kids who have been told that they can't do things, who have been categorized as “learning disabled,” and together we've formed an arena in which excellence and achievement are not only possible but expected and required. In Red Badge of Courage , we take the wound and we turn it into a universe. Art is the only way that you can take a trauma, something awful, and transform it into something that is not only beautiful and transcendent but inspiring to others. You have to go through this struggle for your work to have authority. Otherwise it's just décor.

Rollins has been encouraged by King's refusal to believe that anything was impossible for God. King's God was not a lofty and aloof old man in the sky; God was an active presence in the blood, sweat, and tears of his people, revealing himself throughout his creation. He wrote:

God has the light that can shine through the darkness. We have experiences when the light of day vanishes, leaving us in some dark and desolate midnight—moments when our highest hopes turn to shambles of despair or when we are victims of some tragic injustice and some terrible exploitation. During such moments our spirits are almost overcome by gloom and despair, and we feel that there is no light anywhere. But ever and again, we look toward the east and discover that there is another light which shines even in the darkness, and “the spear of frustration” is transformed “into a shaft of light.”

Rollins and K.O.S. manifest this change in works like This Little Light of Mine [see back cover]. This piece turns a civil rights freedom song, and the first song that Rollins ever learned in Sunday school, into a spiritual and artistic manifesto. It declares that, although too many people hide their light under the bushel of self-doubt, art can and must be a light in the darkness of a broken world.

The theme of light and darkness brings us back to From the Earth to the Moon. This work was first created in a dream by Christopher Hernandez, the youngest, and one of the brightest, of the K.O.S. members. Christopher had observed that the streets of their neighborhood were littered with broken auto glass and mirror fragments, the residue of vandalism and theft. No one cleaned this glass up or paid any attention to it, but Christopher saw its potential. He brought the bits of glass and mirror to the studio and cataloged them by size and color. Then he carefully placed them on the canvas ( From the Earth to the Moon is one of the few works by Rollins and K.O.S. not made on book pages) using a chart of imagined constellations projected onto the canvas with an overhead projector.

Jules Verne's early science fiction novel From the Earth to the Moon described a fantastic journey at a time when space travel was still an impossible dream. The book proposes that even the impossible can be achieved, or at least must be attempted.

Nevertheless, sometimes heartbreaking disappointments arise in the attempt. In From the Earth to the Moon, the main characters fail to reach the moon. Caught in orbit around it, their space capsule takes on the appearance, from earth, of a star. Rollins and K.O.S. have faced difficulties and even death threats, but Rollins is philosophical: “I always saw each situation as difficult and terrifying, but I saw them not as problems but tests of faith.” Of critics who spread unsubstantiated gossip about his relationships with his students, Rollins says, “You want to hate the person saying these ugly things, but you have to love them and keep doing what you are doing to prove them wrong by perseverance.”

The darkest night in the history of K.O.S. was Valentine's Day of 1993, when drug dealers used Christopher as a decoy to gain entrance to a neighbor's apartment, then executed the boy. Christopher was fifteen years old.

Of the afterlife of artists, Vincent van Gogh wrote:

Painters...being dead and buried, speak to the next generation or to several succeeding generations through their work.... In a painter's life death is not perhaps the hardest thing there is.... Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France ? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is that we cannot get to a star while we are alive, any more then we can take the train when we are dead. So it seems possible to me that cholera, gravel, tuberculosis, and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, buses, and railways are terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

This vision of life after death became the basis for the famous painting Starry Night. In that sky, one can see a form, a spirit, rising up from the earth and being joined to another form coming down from above. Together these forms become a new star.

Discussing From the Earth to the Moon , the normally exuberant Rollins becomes more reflective:

After twenty years I can finally see the connections in our works. In almost every single case it is a story of a protagonist who goes through a crisis, survives the crisis, is redeemed, and celebrates the complicated beauty of survival. And this parallels our experience in the Bronx. I discovered this in the tragedy of Christopher's murder. I thought that I had lost him forever but then I saw the work he created at the Hirshhorn and he was there resplendent. He is there but you have to have eyes to see it. You have to be operating on a level that accepts the phenomenology of spirit.

The art of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. teaches us to see. We see through their work that beauty can be wrested from torment and temptation, that joy can be stolen back from suffering, that a little light of love can overcome the deepest darkness and shine like the sun at midnight. If bits of broken auto glass from the street can become stars, if new universes can be created out of the discarded things of this world, history can be made, because then nothing is impossible.

Issue #45 • Spring 2005