The Scarlet Letter VI, 1993 (oil and acrylic on book pages mounted on canvas)

In 1982, the artist, activist, and educator Tim Rollins founded the art collective, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival). This unique collaborative practice of Rollins and a group of South Bronx high school students combined lessons in reading literature classics with the collective production of works of art. For this painting, while one student read aloud from the text, other K.O.S. members created images that related aspects of Hawthorne’s narrative to their own experiences of exclusion and difference. Working in what has become their signature style, they pasted or recreated their images and marks on cut-out pages of the book laid down in a grid and glued to a canvas. The seven variant “A” motifs in the painting are, at their most literal, allusions to the enforced wearing of the letter “A” by heroine Hester Prynne as punishment for adultery. They also suggest the range of interpretations by K.O.S. individuals. Rollins explained, “Just as Hester is wrongly condemned to a life of poverty and silence, so is the South Bronx and too many of its individuals. The kids are really into signifying and identity. This is the major impetus behind graffiti—this verifying of an identity in a hostile, leveling environment. And so our Scarlet Letter is about taking an unjust stigma and turning it into a transcendent emblem of pride.”