Beyond Borders:
Two Portfolios by Robert Ryman and Tim Rollins + K.O.S.
WCMA, Williamstown
July 18 - End of 1998
Two portfolios of prints by American contemporary artists ROBERT RYMAN and TIM ROLLINS + K.O.S. are on display at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) through the end of the year. The show, "Beyond Borders: Two Portfolios by Robert Ryman and Tim Rollins + K.O.S.," challenges how viewers see art and explores commonly held notions about who can produce artwork and for whom it is created.
The exhibition features aquatints by Robert Ryman from 1975 and etchings by Tim Rollins + K.O.S., The Temptation of Saint Antony I-XIV, from 1989. Both artists are represented in major museum collections and have exhibited nationally and internationally. The pieces are on loan from the collection of the well-known conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, who has supported his colleagues through his noted collection of conceptual, minimal, and post-minimal art.
"We are grateful to Sol LeWitt whose generosity to New England museums and other artists is legendary," said Linda Shearer, director of WCMA. "Although each artist came of age in different decades--Ryman in the 1960s and Rollins in the 1980s, there is a remarkable affinity between their work."
Born in 1930, ROBERT RYMAN sees the challenge of painting as "discovering a new way of seeing." After studying music in college, Ryman moved to New York in 1952 and began to experiment with painting. Since 1955 Robert Ryman has worked predominantly in white. "The use of white in my paintings came about when I realized that it didn’t interfere. It's a neutral color that allows for clarification of nuances in painting. It makes other aspects of painting visible that would not be so clear with the use of other colors." The variations of the square, the border, and even his signature quietly challenge the viewer to look closely to uncover important differences that reveal the artist's process.
TIM ROLLINS, who was born in 1955, has worked collaboratively since the early 1980s with K.O.S., a changing group of teenagers from the South Bronx in New York who call themselves "Kids of Survival." He describes his work with them as "making a way out of no way through art." As a special education teacher, Tim Rollins engaged his students who had been designated as "learning disabled," using a progressive and collaborative method. The fourteen prints on loan to WCMA from the Sol LeWitt Collection are based on Gustave Flaubert’s hallucinogenic prose-poem The Temptation of Saint Antony. Created by Tim Rollins with Richard Cruz, George Garces, Carlos Rivera, Nelson Savinon, and printed by San Francisco’s Crown Point Press, the etchings have an organic and haunting quality that demonstrates the group’s ability to translate the experience of language and life into visual imagery.
This exhibition was organized by summer intern Dorothy Moss, Williams College Graduate Program in Art History, Class of 1999.
WCMA - WILLIAMS COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART
15 Lawrence Hall Drive, Ste 2, Williamstown, MA 01267
