was born in Pittsfield, Maine in 1955. He received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1978. Rollins later studied at New York University, Department of Art Education and has taught art in a number of schools. Rollins was a cofounder of Group Material (1979), a collective of socially committed artists. He began his teaching career with Learning to Read Through the Arts, an arts and literacy program which brought him to many of the city's poorest neighborhoods. In the early eighties Rollins began working in the Bronx as a school teacher at I.S. 52, teaching emotionally handicapped and learning disabled students. Art-making provided a teaching strategy, and the collaborative process of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. grew out of this pedagogical model. Rollins began to work with the students during lunch hour and after school which resulted in the founding of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) and the Art and Knowledge Workshop in 1982. At this point he took up residence in the Longwood Arts Center. The imagery for the group's paintings is generally derived from texts of great works of literature which are read aloud. These images are developed individually, then distilled into a collective work, and often painted onto a grid of pages from the books, which have been glued to the canvas.

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