Press

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) will lead students from Wednesday, Jan. 27, through Friday, Jan. 29, as they work on an abstract mural based on the speech "I See The Promised Land" by Martin Luther King Jr.

The sessions will take place on each of the days from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the New York State Museum. As part of the State Education Department, the Museum is committed to providing quality education programs.

K.O.S. is a collective of student/artists started in the early 1980s by Rollins, then a special education teacher at Public School 52 in the South Bronx.

He now leads students throughout the world as they install the abstract murals working off literary pieces and speeches, such as "Prometheus Bound" and "I See the Promised Land."

The speech King gave on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, is a particularly inspirational work that resonates with today's teens, Rollins said.

"I think it was the most prophetic," Rollins said. "This is the generation that would see the "Promised Land" Martin Luther King envisioned. It's a beginning of a new sort of consciousness for America's youth."

The project begins with the students listening to the speech as they read along. About 75 members of the Discovery Squad and the Museum Club, the State Museum's after school programs for neighborhood youth, will participate. Students then are given a slide presentation about the history of the triangle throughout world art. The possible symbolism and meanings of triangles are discussed, along with how the students might use the motif in their collective interpretation of the Rev. King's great final sermon.

Then work on the abstract art form begins. Students sketch triangles on actual pages of the speech, and Rollins asks them to mix acrylic paint in their color of hope to paint the triangles. "You have to have hope to give it a color," he said. The pages then will be affixed to a wall at the State Museum for display.

Future Rollins exhibitions will be held at the Stuck Museum in Munich, Germany, and at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., in the fall of 1999.

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*Reporters requesting interviews with Rollins must make arrangements by calling 518/474-0079.