1/2/2024 0 Comments 90s photo backdrop![]() ![]() The work on view at O-Town House is part of a larger, ongoing series generated from various workshops around the country that will culminate in an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art once the series reaches 1,369 - the number of lightbulbs the narrator of “Invisible Man” has wired to the ceiling of his basement hovel and powers with electricity illegally siphoned from the power company. The shift in scale between “Invisible Man” and the work produced in previous workshops based on the same text reflects the adaptive nature of K.O.S.’ group process. The mixing of students from different groups in a single workshop “was new for this particular project, and it opened up our eyes as to what the possibilities could be,” says Angel Abreu. ![]() started with middle school students in the Bronx but over the years has collaborated with high school and graduate students, usually from a single school or organization. ![]() Now, along with other original members including Savinon, Jorge Abreu and Robert Branch, he helms the ongoing evolution of the group - which is expanding into digital and video work, also on view at O-Town House - in addition to his own art practice and a teaching post at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Putting together workshops for different groups seems key to keeping the energy and spirit of the K.O.S. Say “black, white and blue” enough times and it sounds like an elegy for America, sung only through color.įor current show at O-Town House, a gallery run by Scott Cameron Weaver out of the historical Granada Buildings in MacArthur Park, students from the Windward School, a private college-prep school in Mar Vista, and Ryman Arts, an extracurricular nonprofit art program made up of students from different schools, got together for a workshop facilitated by artists and original K.O.S. Black, white and blue might be a poetic coda for what we’ve been through. Plangent blue dominates against the backdrop of black-and-white text. Like the Constructivists, earlier “Invisible Man” series adhered to a strict palette - though red is conspicuously absent. The knifelike triangle coming down from the top baseline of the “M” graphic is reminiscent of the red triangle in El Lissitzky’s 1919 Soviet propaganda poster “Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge,” a lithograph of a sharp red isosceles symbolizing the Bolsheviks of the 1917 Russian Revolution, piercing a white circle symbolizing the anti-communist party. This tension becomes the backdrop to studio-generated large paintings, which have the look of a single author but are the result of many hands. As when trying too hard to look at a 3D eye image, commanding it to be one thing or another, relaxing the eye allows it to be both. The giant I-M of the paintings alternatively appear as Modernist abstraction or graphic typography, becoming like Rubin’s vase or a Rorschach test of aesthetic sympathies. We worked individually, yet it felt communal.”Ĭhopped and screwed and reassembled, the text folds out into new forms of legibility, freeing it from the technology of the book.Īlthough the study images were small, finished paintings from the “Invisible Man” series were mounted on 36-by-36-inch canvases and seemingly attacked on all sides by three triangles and one rectangle that form the letters I-M in negative space. “Our conversations created an electricity and synergy that fueled my mind around the intersections of literature, social justice and visual art. When they were asked via text message what the workshop experience was like for them, student Anna Jones texted back, “The room felt holy.” show, “Invisible Man” at the gallery O-Town House, is made up of actual pages from a copy of the eponymous book - a standard feature across the majority of K.O.S.’ work, and a tricky one.Īre the books destroyed or reborn? One definition of destroying a book would be to make it unreadable, yet the paintings are visceral evidence of a physical and energetic engagement with the text through the oral readings, music and improvisational image generation that occurs in the workshop, including a process called “jammin” in which the artists draw or paint while another reads aloud. stands for Kids of Survival, and it has grown from an inner-city arts program to an evolving arts collective with an international imprint. Originally called Art and Knowledge, K.O.S. Amid renewed hand-wringing in the art world over what it means to be an artist and also an advocate, and whether it’s possible to be both at once, Studio K.O.S., an art collective founded by artist Tim Rollins with South Bronx middle school students in 1982, has mounted its first Los Angeles exhibition.
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