Resources
Collage and Print Media Text
Exploring collage through layering, overlapping, and combining disparate elements to create new meanings.
RL. KID: Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
Rl. IKI: Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
Students will be able to:
- Identify the elements of a story
- Discuss how images and words create meaning in a text
- Write a story about an artwork
- Create a collage that tells a story
About
The visual strategies of collage – layering, overlapping, and combining disparate elements to create new meanings – are prevalent tools for artists.
Text has been integral to collage since the first examples were created in the early twentieth century. Early Cubist artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque often included pieces of newspaper, advertisements, sheet music, and painted letters as a way of linking art to the everyday world. Using text added precise messages to collage and often referenced current events. Artists today still use this strategy.
In work like Amerika IX by Tim Rollins, text is the foundation for collage – both literally and figuratively – and provides context and meaning.
Artwork
Tim Rollins, K.O.S. and Kids of Charlotte, Amerika IX, 1987
In 1981, Tim Rollins was recruited by the Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx to develop a curriculum that incorporated making art with reading and writing for students classified as “academically or emotionally at risk.” Rollins and his students collaboratively developed K.O.S., Kids of Survival, whose signature style consisted of painting on pages from classical books of European art and literature.
Amerika IX is part of a series of paintings based on Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika. Pages from the novel were used as the base for Rollins’ work, and the golden horn imagery was also borrowed from Kafka’s text.
To create this piece, Rollins and K.O.S. teamed up with a group of youth from Charlotte, North Carolina. Rollins asked the students, “If you could be a golden instrument … if you could play a song of your freedom and dignity and your future and everything you feel about Amerika and this country … what would your horn look like?” This work was their collective response.
More information about Tim Rollins:
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/archives-tim-rollins-goes-dead-end-avant-garde-1988-9590/
https://theartsandeducation.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/what-we-can-learn-from-tim-rollins-1955-2017/
IMAGE CREDIT: Tim Rollins, K.O.S. and Kids of Charlotte (American, 1955 – 2017), Amerika IX, 1987. Mixed media and collage. Gift of the Artists and Knight Gallery, Spirit Square Center for the Arts, with support from the North Carolina Arts Council, 1987.33. Collection of The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. © Tim Rollins, K.O.S. and Kids of Charlotte, 1987.
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