Tim Lamp On The Raft Essay

Asleep on the Raft, by Tim Rollins and Kids of Survival (K.O.S.), is a wonderful piece of artwork that focuses on a page in chapter fifteen from the famous American novel The Adventures Huckleberry Finn, by Missouri author Mark Twain. This image captures one of the many hardships, of one of the main characters in this novel, had to endure on his way to finally being a free man down the Missouri River. Nearly thirty years ago, Tim Rollins started K.O.S. to help kids who struggle with school and the difficulties of living in the South Bronx, with artistic potential but their skills to good use by making artwork based off of novels and music scores. This isn’t you’re regular after school program, because the kids involved are actually helping to make real art that is sold and put …show more content…
The painting Rollins and K.O.S. made is describing the part in the story when Huckleberry and Jim get separated from each other during a fog. Some how Huckleberry founds his way back to Jim and the raft once the fog clears. Rollins and K.O.S.’s artwork uses mixed media on a canvas, meaning it is covered with random pages of the novel, and is then covered with a painting of the picture from the book of Jim sleeping on the raft. It is relatively forty feet by sixty inches and is now placed in the permanent collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. When asked how the books are chosen for different art projects, Rollins states in an interview with Lilly Wei of the Studio International, “Intuition. A dry classroom catches on fire real quick and there’s excitement in discovering how we can converse with famous classics, how we can insinuate ourselves into the cosmic conversation.” What is a special touch to this piece of work is the original page, from where the lager image originated, is in the middle of the whole