passages March 2018

Tim Rollins (1955–2017)

AFTER TIM DIED, I incessantly watched videos of him conducting workshops and giving his remarkable preaching-and-teaching talks. Quick to coin a potent phrase, Tim’s audacity was intelligent and strategic. “Do you want to make history?” he’d yell at a group of students. Locking eyes with a possible Kids of Survival—or K.O.S.—recruit, he’d solemnly ask, “Do you believe in love at first sight?” The room came alive when Tim spoke. Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself. He was on fire his entire life.

Tim was uncannily self-possessed—purposeful from an early age. He delivered

print Summer 2017

JULIE AULT ON GENTRIFICATION

THE EVER-UNFOLDING VIOLENCE of gentrification and its heartless displacement and cultural demolition are irreversible. Despite the predictable consequences, collectively speaking, we keep going down the path, armed with the pretense that development is inevitable. While socioeconomic forces that fuel and enact gentrification appear to be out of reach and unpreventable, Sarah Schulman aptly calls individual consciousness and deeds into question in her 2012 book The Gentrification of the Mind:

Gentrified happiness is often available to us in return for collusion with injustice. We go along with

passages February 2010

Nancy Spero

IN 1966, NANCY SPERO concluded that the language of painting was “too conventional, too establishment,” and she decided that from then on she would work exclusively on paper—flimsy, vulnerable, insignificant paper meant to be pinned to a wall. Having recently returned to the United States after a number of years in Europe, Spero was deeply disturbed by the atrocities the US military was committing in Vietnam, and over the course of the next four years, she created her first significant works on paper, the scores of gouache-and-ink pictures that make up her “War Series.” As she later described

Julie Ault