A painting composition of music sheets painted with concentric, rhythmic shapes of varying colo…

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Artist Tim Rollins (American, 1955 - 2017)

Artist Kids of Survival (American, founded 1981)

Date2005 - 2006

Mediumwatercolor, India ink, abaca paper collage, mustard seed, and music score pages on canvas

Dimensions46 1/4 × 42 × 1 5/8 inches (117.5 × 106.7 × 4.1 cm)

Credit LinePurchased with funds provided by the City of Savannah Youth Art Workshops.

Object number2006.38

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Copyright© Tim Rollins and K.O.S. The images and text contained on this page are owned by Telfair Museums or used by the Museum with permission from the owners. Unauthorized reproduction, transmission or display of these materials is prohibited with the exception of items deemed “fair use” as defined by U.S. and international copyright laws.Label TextTim Rollins is a conceptual artist who began his career as a special education teacher in public school 52 in the South Bronx. He established the Art of Knowledge Workshops for students with learning disabilities, designed to encourage a greater interest in literature. For one of the first projects, Rollins had his students draw at their desks while he read aloud George Orwell's 1984. All of the students had copies of the book; one misunderstood the instructions and drew directly on the pages. The creative possibilities of placing images over text excited the class, so they applied the pages of the entire novel to a canvas and began working in concert on a large-scale composition. The process has since become the trademark of the collaboration between Rollins and the students, who call themselves Kids of Survival (K.O.S.), in recognition of the skills acquired through participation in the workshop, which have helped them to better navigate the social, cultural, and political factions that make up their world. To create this work, artist Tim Rollins visited the Telfair and had local teenagers create visual images based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The imagery is based on a passage which Oberon (the king of the fairies) orders the fairy Puck to obtain a flower from Cupid that causes one to love the first person a person sees. While reading excerpts from the play, workshop participants listened to Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was especially inspiring to the workshop participants as Mendelssohn was only a teenager himself when he composed the work. In this painting, the magical flowers described in the play by the Oberon are painted over pages of the score of Mendelssohn’s music.

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