In the lobby of the Frye Art Museum on Saturday, a few people stood transfixed in front of a projection on the wall showing a teacher yell at an apathetic teen.
“What you do, how you conduct yourself, what you make” the teacher, yelled, “is what matters. Period.”
The two are Tim Rollins and Carlos Garcia. Garcia belongs to a group of students called KOS (Kids of Survival), who work with Rollins and create world-renowned art currently featured at the Frye.
The group began in the early ’80s, making art in a classroom in the Bronx. Rollins was just a middle school art teacher, but he inspired his students to move out of the classroom to a studio, where they learned what they did with their lives defined them more than where they came from. For one of the displays in the Frye, the students were instructed to find bricks to paint their homes on. They all painted buildings on fire. Arson in the Bronx was incredibly widespread, but new creative energy was flowing up from the rubble.
“South Bronx was literally on fire. Also, culture was on fire,” Rollins said.
After experimenting with a few sculptures and other projects, they moved into what would be their only way of producing art: a technique called “jamming.”
Jamming uses “catalysts” (books or music) to inspire sketches.
At first, Rollins would read aloud from books he brought, but then others began bringing their own books and ideas to be catalysts. Once the students reached a place where they felt they had gotten the right feeling from their drawings, they would create a painting on canvas, most of which were quite large.
Jamming often took years, with the students creating “thousands of drawings,” according to Angel Abreu, one of the KOS, who lived and worked in Seattle for several years.
The artists worked in a style of painting where they would paint onto the pages of their catalysts.
“It was about taking ownership of that text, not just reading,” said Ian Berry, curator of the exhibit. “It was never about illustrating the texts; it was about relating the content to what the artists know, feel, and sense in everyday lives,”
The group’s earliest paintings at the Frye are graffiti-style artworks from jamming over “Dracula” and “Frankenstein,” but others are catalyzed by “The Scarlet Letter,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Copies of these books are in a reading room by the exhibit, offering viewers a chance to skim through the books that caused the works.
One of their most powerful pieces in the minimalist style that became their signature technique is “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs. It has different color ribbons creating bars over the text. Originally, they intended to cut the ends of the ribbons because they hang to the floor, but the artists realized the trailing ribbons represent her freedom. The whole piece begs a profound question: Which side of the bars are viewers on, the free side or the caged?
A fun and frustrating work is one of the “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” pieces. After dripping liquids onto watercolor paper, like Puck and the love-in-idleness, they glued the paper onto the canvas. They also glued one tiny mustard seed on each creation. Trying to find the seed is difficult and time-consuming, but it displays the faith the mustard seed represents.
The exhibit as a whole demonstrates the power of collaborative art. Through jamming to catalysts and the simple power of sketching and painting in a large group, KOS shows true devotion to the idea of working together.
“It’s a democracy and a dictatorship,” Berry said. “Everyone has a voice.”
Berry’s words and selections for the exhibit show a cross section of KOS’s main theme: individual expression within group collaboration.
The exhibit will be on display at the Frye until May 31. Tim Rollins and KOS member Angel Abreu will be at the museum March 18 at 7 p.m. to speak about the exhibit and the importance of collaboration in contemporary art.
Alena may be reached at schoonma@seattleu.edu.
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