Curated by Ian Berry

Twenty-five years of pedagogical experimentation, which began in the financially devastated South Bronx in the ’80s and spread to the white walls of high art, will come into focus with the first major retrospective of Tim Rollins and the Kids of Survival. Rollins worked with his former public school students to generate collaborative paintings and sculptures in an audacious attempt to reinvent the stodgy world of art education; together, they produced a body of visually sensuous artworks based on texts by the likes of Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Bram Stoker, and Mark Twain. A selection of twenty of these pieces, accompanied by an extensive catalogue—with texts by Rollins’s fellow Group Material alum Julie Ault, curator Ian Berry, critic David Deitcher, and others—presents a welcome opportunity to assess this collective endeavor.

— Gregory Sholette