Artist, activist, and teacher, Tim Rollins began his career in 1980 as a co-founder of Group Material, a corps of young New York artists who pooled their money to rent a space in the East Village and mount critical exhibitions that addressed social themes and subjects like alienation, consumerism, fashion, music, and gender. In 1981, Tim Rollins, then twenty-six years old, was recruited by George Gallego, principal of Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx, to develop a curriculum that incorporated art-making with reading and writing lessons for students who had been classified as academically or emotionally “at risk.” Rollins told his students on that first day, “Today we are going to make art, but we are also going to make history.”