Kota Ezawa:

The Crime of Art

Tuesday, March 12, 2019 to Sunday, December 1, 2019

This exhibition will bring together new and recent works related to Ezawa’s The Crime of Art series, a group of light-boxes and video animations that chronicle some of the most infamous and high profile museum heists in history. At the heart of this exhibition is a series of images that pays homage to the 13 artworks — including those by Degas, Manet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer — stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that surveys Ezawa’s career using crime as a topical lens, published by Radius Books.

Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art is by SITE Sante Fe in collaboration with the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

Exhibition Season Presenters: Ameris Bank; City of Jacksonville; Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville, Inc.; Robert D. and Isabelle T. Davis Endowment at The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida; The Director's Circle at the Cummer Museum; The Schultz Family Endowment; Winston Family Foundation

Exhibition Season Sponsors: Mr. Ryan A. Schwartz; Carl S. Swisher Foundation, Inc.

About the Artist

Kota Ezawa draws from the histories of media, popular culture, and art history to create distilled renderings of iconic images. His simplified versions of indelible images remain easily recognizable and potent, the result of a process that illuminates the hold certain images have on their viewers. Working in a range of mediums such as digital animation, slide projections, light boxes, paper cut-outs, collage, print, and wood sculptures, Ezawa maintains a keen awareness of how images shape our experience and memory of events.