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Since 1981, Tim Rollins has been working with academically challenged but artistically gifted students from the South Bronx and other poor neighborhoods in New York City in a wildly successful art and education program whose main purpose is to turn the kids love of the arts into a love of learning, with every single participating student going on to college. Since 1987, artwork by the Kids of Survival (K.O.S.) studio has been exhibited internationallytheir signature style is to create hundreds of drawings about a classic text, then to select the strongest images which are then handpainted onto a grid of pages taken from the chosen book. When asked why he chose The Frogs, Rollins replied:
In the version we read, as Dionysos rows to Hades, the pond is ringed with thousands of singing, dancing, celebrating frogs. Dionysos cannot understand this. He says, Its awful here. You should be suffering and crying. You should be tragic figures. This is exactly the attitude of mainstream culture toward kids who are born and raised in places like the South Bronx: How can you make beautiful things when there is so much suffering in your situation? We respond exactly as the frogs do: If we do not sing, we shall swell up and die, brek-kek-kek-kek ko-ax, ko-ax. We make this work because we must.
In 1993, wed been working on these images but nothing was coming together. Then one of our favorite younger kids, Chris Hernandez, was brutally murdered. Hed just turned fifteen, but hed been in the group since he was nine years old. We were devastated. We tried to go back to work but we could hardly function, and we ended up losing our studio space. When we were moving, we found Chris portfolio. In it were these beautiful, buoyant, hilarious, irrepressible drawings of frog shapes. And his best friend said, This is a way we can get Chris back. So we used Chris drawings as a starting point. We could no longer wallow in our grief. The work had to be about joy. It had to be about the beauty of survival, which is also the underlying theme of Aristophanes comedy. Art is more than just making pretty thingsits a way to affirm your voice in an awful, hostile environment. This work demonstrates the miracle of all artAristophanes is alive, Chris is alive, were alive. That life force is fully evident in the imagery that we made together.Deborah Artman
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